Introduction

I decided to create this blog so that I could have any easy way to display my progress on the independent research project that I am doing for Professor Hollan in the Human Computer Interaction lab at UCSD. In this project I set out to investigate how our cultural concept of music and genres is represented by the tags applied to music in the social/music networking site lastFM.

By exploring the phenomenon of tagging music I intend to develop a better understanding of what motivates the phenomenon of tagging and how we can use this rich source of user generated content to visually represent complicated ubiquitous ideas like musical genre.