- My origional A-Z notebook
- A quick look at Word Splitting
- Numbers and parentheticals that were Leftovers
- My 70s A-Z notebook
- My latest, 80s A-Z notebook
- A small 80s Leftovers notebook follow on to the 80s A-Z
In December of 2016, WXPN did a multi-week alphabetical play list called A to Z. For a bit of background on the playlist, see All about the XPN A to Z. Early discussions about ordering, specifically the question of treating articles as signification, prompted me to do some analysis of the play list.
Initially, I'd hoped it might turn into something interesting. I think it sort of did. I ended up going down a few interesting data spelunking efforts, such as "what first word was most common?" or "how did the distribution of artists differ between the play list and XPN's normal programming?" Honestly, I ended up spending more time than I planned as the play list ran for over 17 days and I was doing a combination of rerunning the code to pick up new data, trying to add new bits of data analysis, adapting to changes I hadn't anticipated.
As I was doing this, two other listeners: Lena Bartell and Bruce Segal started doing similar efforts. Working in parallel, I think, inspired us all to dig deeper into the data. It didn't hurt that we started getting shout-outs on air and in the #XPNAtoZ twitter stream. Eventually we even got some press coverage. Bruce's work was featured in The #XPNAtoZ by the numbers and a second article on The Key had us Meet Lena Bartell, #XPNAtoZ data nerd and massive music fan. Some of my work was featured on Philly.com in Tuning into the WXPN A to Z marathon, alphabetically. End of the day it was an absolute blast.
For my final results, see the AtoZ notebook on jupyter.org. Do take time to checkout Bruce's results as well as Lena's results on Tableau Public. Also check out Lena's github repo.
In April 2017, there was a second Leftovers playlist with all the non-alphabetical titles that were skipped before. I've got some evolving data on that in the Leftovers notebook.
Since then there have been two more A-Z playlists. Last Year there was a XPN 70s A-Z that was all 70s music. And this year we went to the 80s with XPN 80s A-Z. I did notebooks for them as well: 70's A-Z notebook and 80's A-Z notebook
After a year's hiatus, countdowns are back, but in the previous listener curated style. So in 2020 we have the XPN 2020 Countdown. I've started a notebook for that, XPN 2020 notebook. And this year the station is doing stats as well, as The 2020 Countdown, By the Numbers. Be sure to check them out too.
In addition to my work, and Bruce's for the 80s A-Z, Lisa Bartlet did a real nice series of tweets with word clouds for each letter. The playlists generate a good bit of nerdy data play.