This article in the series exploring the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at when the concerts were held. This covers questions such as in which decade or year they took place, at what point during the year, on which days of the week, and at what times of day? And how did this vary according to the type of concert?
Continue reading →
In this article about the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset, I will look in more detail at the prices of concert tickets.
The published data has multiple prices and categories listed in single cells of the spreadsheet. This needs to be parsed before it can be used for statistical analysis.
Continue reading →
I’m delighted to have my article about power laws and musical fame and obscurity featured on the cover of this month’s Significance magazine.
It has been a pleasure to work with the editor Brian Tarran to get the article ready for publication. It is a condensed version of my longer paper Fame, Obscurity and Power Laws in Music History, published a couple of months ago.
The first article in this series looked at how to get the data on Eighteenth Century London Concerts into a more usable form, and the second geocoded the locations and classified the venues by type. In this third article, we will start the analysis of the data by looking in more detail at the distribution of concert venues.
Continue reading →
In the previous article looking at Simon McVeigh’s “Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800“, I considered how to organise the data to make it suitable for statistical analysis. In this second article, I will add to the dataset by identifying the exact locations of the concert venues.
Continue reading →
This is the first in a series of articles looking at Simon McVeigh’s fascinating dataset “Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800“. In this article I will describe the data and consider how it can be put into a form suitable for statistical analysis. A second article will look at finding the locations of the concert venues, and I will then move on to some analysis of the dataset.
Continue reading →
Many British buildings are adorned with plaques, marking the birthplace or residence of a famous person, or the site of a significant event. Details of these plaques are available in an online database, and I thought it would be interesting to see how many of them have a musical connection.
Continue reading →
I’m pleased to report that my article “Fame, Obscurity and Power Laws in Music History” has been published in the journal Empirical Musicology Review.
Continue reading →
I recently stumbled across this page on Wikipedia, listing music students and their teachers. This is an ideal dataset to explore as a network diagram, or “graph”, in which a set of points (or “nodes”) are connected by lines (or “edges”). Here, the nodes are individuals, and there is an edge between them if one taught the other.
Continue reading →
“Desert Island Discs” is the UK’s longest running radio show, still going strong on BBC Radio 4 over 78 years after the first episode on the BBC Forces Programme in January 1942. Each episode, an interviewed “castaway” chooses the eight pieces of music they would take with them to a desert island. They also select their favourite of these tracks, plus a book and a luxury item.
Continue reading →