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| I bow to You, O God, Who appears in the astonishing form of Pete Frame |
The curation task I took upon myself in mapping the various relationships between musicians is something that Pete has been doing for decades.
For the obligatory bit of math here, the format used by Pete, though called a Family Tree, is not technically a tree. Trees, according to computer science, are graphs that have no direction, and are acyclic. Pete's trees are constrained by time and thus qualify as directed graphs. To illustrate, the Ozzy Ozbourne of 1985 can't loop back to join the Elf of 1967. Furthermore, this non-looping quality makes them a directed acyclic graph, a structure that has showed up regularly in my work.
I'm both looking forward to, and dreading, trying to add all this data into my own map.
Hat tip to BoingBoing for pointing me to the Family of Rock. You've destroyed what little sleep I could have had over the next decade.
I am looking forward to the additions to the Map of Rock.
ReplyDeleteCould a graph have the looping properties without having to be represented on a computer? For example, if in the case you gave above if Ozzy Ozbourne of 1985 could it qualify as a different type of graph?
It could. Data on a computer is not that conceptually different from data on paper. The access is just faster and more dynamic. Think of the difference between looking things up in an atlas vs. google maps. In the case of Ozzy travelling through space and time, if you want to put that on paper, it's just a matter of drawing a line that loops back to Elf.
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