Friday, May 17, 2019

Visualizing the [Information] History of Fugazi


This is an amazing set of graphics and information:

go HERE to see it.

Subjects include:

The International Fugazi Tour Network

Unconventional Venues

Local Activism & Fundraising

Fellow Travellers

Family Tree

small screen shot sample below of one of the several graphics.



Data & Methodology

List of shows scraped from the Fugazi Live Series website, using the Data Miner Chrome extension. I then used a geocoder to generate latitude and longitude coordinates for each show, based on the city, state, and country fields. For the shows in Washington, I replaced the generated values with more precise values, by looking up the lat + long coordinates for each DC venue based on their street address.

Detail pages for each show often noted when the show was a benefit. I manually added benefit show information into the data table, and then used the following calculation to figure out how much money they raised: Door Price multipled by the Number of Attendees, minus 20% to pay the sound person and other incidentals. These are approximate amounts. I also pulled “Bands played with” data from the show detail pages, and used Tableau Prep to separate the list out to individual entries, correct any misspellings or duplicate entries, and then get counts.

For the Family Tree visualization, I sourced the data from bandtoband.com, an online database of connections between bands, by shared members. Bandtoband.com considers a band member to be someone who played on a recording, so someone who was only part of a live lineup or just joined for one tour are not in the database. Technically Fugazi had a fifth member for their last years as an active band: Jerry Busher. He played a 2nd drumkit and other instruments, both live and on the album “The Argument.” I left him out of the first ring as a he is not a “main member” of Fugazi for most of their career, but represented him on the Family Tree by his appearance in the bands French Toast, All Scars, and Fidelity Jones.

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