A musicians cloud

Clicking on the image at left should bring up an HTML cloud of links into WorldCat Identities.  The names in the current cloud on the main Identities page is based on a measure based on number of records and library holdings.  David Palfrey (Univ. of Cambridge), who computed the Wikipedia links on the Identity pages, challenged me on the measure.  Not being able to defend it strongly (it seemed to work?), I rewrote the ranking.  The musicians cloud was built by finding all the Identity pages that seem to be musicians (based on subject heading and genre), ranks them by number of works, manifestations, and library holdings, and picks the top identities from the three lists.  A better way might be to find all the music records in WorldCat and work from that, but I wanted to see how well the Identity records themselves would work.

At first I also included roles, but it seems that many widely held authors have done some sort of musical work that shows up in their role list, so right now that is being ignored.

--Th

Comments

[Jakob]

Talking about WorldCat Identities today my colleague had the idea of showing the number of publications per year for topic instead of person. Additional to identities there should be "WorldCat Subject Heading", "WorldCat Genre", "WorldCat Classification" and so on - for instance maybe there once were more publications of people with subject "Composers--Austria" than today. This way you can also find "forgotton topics" additional to forgotten people.