Part 3. FLOAT Case Studies
3.2 Mapping Jay-Z’s Collaborators
Mapping Jay-Z’s Collaborators
Project Rationale: This projects offers an overview of the various singers, rappers, and producers Jay-Z has worked with across the United States. Looking at this chart, we can begin to comprehend how even though a New York native, his sound is influenced by different geographic regions.
Data Story Description: The visualization illustrates the extent to which Jay-Z has collaborated with different artists across the country.
Formulate – A Research Question
Exploratory Question:
- How often has Jay-Z collaborated on his solo albums?
Explanatory Question (I revised my research questions during the analyzing process):
- Where are Jay-Z’s collaborators originally from?
- How many collaborators are on each of Jay-Z’s albums?
- o What type of role did they play on the album (Producer, Rapper, Singer, etc)?
Locate – A Data Source
For this project, I used The Jay-Z Collaborators Dataset. This pre-assembled dataset is published on the subverse of the Texas Data Repository. The “Black Studies Data Verse” has datasets related to an assortment of topics in Black literature and Black studies in general. The information is already cleaned and organized in a coherent manner.
You can access this information by going to this website here.
Organize – Your Data
This information already came organized. It has a data dictionary that explains the organization and components of the dataset. The dataset has 14 main categories: Release Date, Album Title, Song Title, Track #, Collaborator Name, Collaborator Role, Collaborator Gender, Collaborator Birth Year, Collaborator Birth Decade, Collaborator Origin City, Collaborator Origin State, Collaborator Birth Name, Producer, Number of Samples.
The structure of the dataset is defined in the accompanying data dictionary.
Analyze – Your Data
I used Microsoft Excel to create a pivot table to explore the dataset. I refined my questions after my analysis. I focused on the following columns in order to ask more targeted questions that focused on the specific variables in the dataset.
Explanatory questions:
- Where are Jay-Z’s collaborators originally from?
- How many collaborators are on each of Jay-Z’s albums?
What type of role did they play on the album (Producer, Rapper, Singer, etc)?
Tell— A Data Story
The video models each step. Follow along to re-create the visualization.
Pre-Step: Gathering the data and inserting it into Tableau
This is how we will gather the data from the internet and insert it into the Tableau software. This method of gathering data will work for any website you go to.
- Go to Texas Data Repository (or wherever your data is located)
- Search “Jay-Z Collaborators” and select the dataset created by Dr.Rambsy
- Download the option that is called comma separated values )
- Open tableau then drag and drop your dataset into the software
- Or you can go to Connect on the left bar and select the kind of file you have and uplo