Too Much To Ask From a Row
Published on: Feb 19, 2024Filed under: Scratch
At some point, I lost track of how many records I own.
In and of itself, that’s not that much of a problem. My record collection hasn’t reached hoarding levels. There’s not vinyl stacked on the floor. No tripping hazards. Nor am I chasing a record or accomplishment where the size of my collection would matter.
My record collection seems to have passed Dunbar’s Number [1] which makes it difficult to remember if I own a specific album. Especially when some reason is pushing me to purchase one. Doubly so when a band - like the National [2] - has a habit of similar album names. And when there’s wine involved.
I blame the internet really. My first year or so on the farm I had just enough internet to purchase records and movies, but not enough to stream them. This lead to both my music and film collections swelling.
It also lead to a decision to be more deliberate and conscious with my spending. Reducing the influence of whim (though as you probably might suspect, I’ve never once been accused of being whimsical) on my purchasing habits and instead using my media habits to grow.
Collecting data, tracking something, is the surest way to kill the whimsy. I don’t know if anyone’s said so, but I’d posit that the spreadsheet is the antithesis of the manic pixie dream girl. And I leverage spreadsheets to track a variety of things which I want to turn into habits or otherwise monitor - budget, exercise, wine - but for music and movies, I found the effort wanting.
This isn’t romanticization. Not an assertion that there’s too much magic in a film or record to be contained within a simple row. Rather that the questions I wanted the data to answer were too complex. And that’s the point of data - to be rendered into information and from there knowledge.
I spent the last two weeks of the year on vacation, picking back up the vinyl project that I’d started earlier in the year. Armed with a data for a million vinyl records, I wanted to build a front end to answer some basic questions like
“What records do I own?”
“What genres and styles do I favor?”
And I wanted to get to some deeper questions like
“What records am I missing?”
“What are my musical blind spots?”
Trying to answer these questions drudged up a great deal of thinking on algorithms and knowledge, the scraps of which I’m hoping to collate into notes here.
From a practical aspect, the architecture I used did great at answering the basic questions, but failed on the deeper ones. So I’m still tinkering with my vinyl project in an attempt to make it more useful than a spreadsheet.
And I’m still buying records. Just more deliberately now.