This afternoon in our PCMI SSTP (Secondary School Teachers Program) data working group we had the chance to mess around with Fathom. I have not been overly impressed to this point with the friendliness of the Fathom interface, but am getting more comfortable as I play with it. I am not convinced that I will be letting my students touch it anytime soon, but as the start of the school year is still two months away, that is ok.
I was wondering how to spend the two hours of Fathom-time and I decided to see if I could import the data from my iTunes library. I had to fiddle with things a bit, but after
- choosing export from the iTunes File menu (not Export Library...), and then
- importing this .txt file into an Excel spreadsheet,
- cleaning up the data a bit,
- exporting it as tab delineated .txt file, and then
- importing this file into Fathom I had my data in the form of a collection.
I created a box plot that had Genre as the y-axis and Play Count as the x-axis. From this I determined that my country music songs are played more often than the other genres that I had. A histogram showed that the number of country songs in my iTunes is larger than the number of songs from any other genre. A dot plot with file size on the y-axis and time of song (which shows in seconds) on the x-axis showed a linear pattern with very few files outside the lines. The files with larger file sizes relative to the length of the song were files of the MPEG audio format. This makes some good sense, since the default in iTunes is to import songs in the more compressed AAC format.
It wouldn't be too much trouble to design a lesson where we compiled students' iTunes library information and looked for trends among classes or found the equation of the line that fits the dot plot of song length vs. file size. I am sure I will get time to look at this over the course of the next few weeks.
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