I developed this visualization for exploring my CD collection. The data consists of multiple playlists of ID3 tags generated using the Export Playlist feature in iTunes. The visualization also accesses cover art that I scanned from the booklets of the compact discs which make up my collection. The current version of the data set consists of about 6700 tracks and 545 album covers, totalling about 30MB total.

A Year-Time-Track Plots 3-D scatterplot matrix (with overview matrix) draws rectangles for the year, length, and number of tracks of each album, color-coded on genre. A Decades table summarizes the albums from each decade. A Genres table summarizes the albums of each genre. Nested scatterplots in both tables plot time against the number of tracks. An Albums table summarizes albums of the selected decades and genres.

A graph shows relationships between albums, artists, genres, and years that occur in the collection. Straight lines connect co-occurring attribute values. Convex hulls contain nodes that co-occur with the same attribute value. For instance, all classical albums are contained in the same purple convex hull and connect to the classical genre node.

All three tables are filtered to show only the albums visible in the scatterplot matrix. Conversely, the albums table is sorted on increasing distance from the mouse pointer whenever it is in the scatterplot matrix. As a result, it is possible to perform rapid proximity-similarity exploration on track count, album length, and release year.

The graph can be dynamically filtered by selecting particular columns and pairwise relationships between them (in the checkboxes along the righthand side) as well as by selecting arbitrary subsets of attribute values in those columns (in the tables and scatterplot matrix).

Visualization (3.8 MB). Included images are deliberately obscured for fair use distribution.
Video Tour (37.9 MB)

None.