The Cowbell King

You may have seen my first post about the use of cowbell in rock and pop. Well, I'm back once again (like a renegade master). Basically, by the end of the first post, I realised that Appetite For Destruction, the first (and, dare I say, best) album from Guns N' Roses had 5 tracks featuring the cowbell. I couldn't think of any other album that came close.

So I did some trawling, and joining of music from the original source, cowbellsongs.com with some existing data I had relating to albums and track lists. And eventually I got a list of albums and counts, althought I can't claim all of it is accurate. I also didn't do much data cleaning at all, beyond some glaringly obvious stuff that I knew for a fact was incorrect, or stylistically not accurate ('The Beatles' rather than 'Beatles', for example).

With so many individual points, a bar chart was never going to work, and restricting it to the top 20 or would have been quite a dull visual. My sudden inspiration was to try circle packing, using the packcircles package, which I hoped would allow me to get all the data into a relatively small space.

It worked quite well, I think:

An D3 powered interactive version is available here, which is also quite swish. I think that ends my interest in mucking around with this data now though, but I have some ideas for how packed circles could be put to use with some slightly more mundane information. Perhaps I will be back with some more of these visuals in the future.