The Unstoppable Pop of Taylor Swift: Data visualizations, variable operationalization, and DATA DATA DATA

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 The unstoppable pop of Taylor Swift (reuters.com)

The landing page for the website, reading The Unstoppable Pop of Taylor Swift

Here are some ideas for using this to teach statistics:

Data visualizations and visualization guides:

With cats, y'all. And the Taylor Swift handwriting font. I love the whole vibe of this as well as how they explain their data visualizations.



Operationalizing things:

The page describes three Spotify metrics for music: Acousticness, danceability, and emotion. The data visualization contains a numeric value for each metric and a description of the metric's meaning.

Songs that score high in this metric are primarily backed by acoustic rather than electronic instruments. Swift revealed at the Nashville Songwriter Awards that she sorts her songs into three lyrical genres based on the tool she imagines writing the song with: a quill, a fountain pen or a glitter gel pen. A high score on acoustics is a quintessential quill pen song. In an Apple playlist she curated, she intros, "Quill pen songs are songs with lyrics that make you feel all old fashioned. Like you're a 19th century poet crafting your next sonnet by candlelight." Two recent albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” are prime examples. Taylor traded in the sparkle featured in “Lover” and “1989” for cardigans and cottagecore.

DATA!:

Okay. This is an excellent example of things already. And it is delightful. Then I thought, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun if this was in spreadsheet form!" (I think that A LOT, friends).

But, as I write a book and my syllabi, I don't have time for that, BUT A REDDITOR DID HAVE TIME FOR THAT. Dr. Doon created a spreadsheet with 18 columns of Spotify data for each son. It doesn't include the Midnights data but is still a fantastic amount of data. Do what you want with this data. There is a weak, significant negative correlation between danceability and acousticness. There is a column for the album the song comes from, allowing you to create independent t-test and ANOVA examples.

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