February has been a whirlwind of productivity and I'm excited to share the results of my efforts. Thus far I've introduced five projects. First I discovered that the disk snapshot solution I'd been employing for my server would no longer work at its current scale, so I had to research and implement a new solution. Once that was a success, I set myself to the task of merging and updating two music database systems I'd created years apart on two different operating systems. That was an incredible challenge.
The next three projects were featured here at Innerspace Labs - first the
Nipper RCA “His Master's Voice” project, then the
six-hour drone high-fidelity ambient experiment with Eno's Music For Airports, followed by the
Fred Deakin archive update. But it was the sixth subsequent undertaking which would consume countless late night hours as the latest project continuously exploded in scope and scale, each time introducing new challenges to test my problem-solving skills.
For as long as I've been breathing, I've been compiling and organizing lists of all manners of subjects. I thrive creating order from chaos - chronicling and curating media of the 20th-century. As a young man, I penned lists in leather pocket journals but was frustrated by the fixed and static state of the data one committed to the page. I quickly graduated to Microsoft Office and then to LibreOffice, and by 2013 began self-publishing books of collected lists and spreadsheets to document the progress of my archive.
But the true game-changer came when I adopted the Google suite of apps, most notably Google Docs, Sheets, and the Google Keep task manager. These applications introduced undo history, increased accessibility, and most importantly, shareability to my list-making efforts.
Still, the seamless convenience of Google Drive came with a caveat - scores of lists once generated were quickly forgotten, and the sheer number of them made Google Keep and Google Calendar reminders cumbersome and an ineffective method of managing them at this scale. What I came to realize was that dozens of quality sets of information were disappearing into the digital black void of a Google Drive overrun with lists.
That's what inspired this latest project. I decided to survey my entire history of list-making, compiling databases created in a wide array of formats and constructed on multiple platforms over the years, and to merge them all into a single workbook on Google Sheets. It was an incredible challenge, as the formatting of the data varied tremendously from .M3U to .PUB to raw .TXT to .XLS to proprietary database systems built for Windows XP (OrangeCD), to web-based database systems like Discogs and Goodreads which each offered .CSV exports.
To depict folder-structure-based organizational systems, (commonly employed for artists and label discographies), I utilized
tree -d > list.txt for large libraries. To extract %artist% and %title% metadata from RYM toplist playlists I'd constructed, I developed a spreadsheet combining four formulas to pull nth row values and to truncate “#EXTINF:###,” expressions and file paths from .M3U lists outputting a clean list of tracks.
In October of 2017 I'd authored
The Innerspace Labs Journal: A Listener's Guide to Exploration in Google Docs as a contextual survey of my larger collections. It spans eighty-four pages and includes an active hyperlinked TOC with an X.XX indexing structure and served my needs well for the past two years, but for simple down-and-dirty lists a spreadsheet seemed like a more accessible format.
And so I constructed this latest effort -
The Innerspace Labs Media Exploration Master Workbook - a cloud-based 150-tab set of spreadsheets combining all of my list data into a single, searchable, sharable index with a hyperlinked Table of Contents for easy navigation. The interface is intuitive, it loads lightning fast on even the most modest of systems and across all browsers and platforms, is mobile-friendly, and it will continue to grow as new content is introduced to my library.
The TOC is segmented into four primary themes:
- Literature and Essays
- Cinema and Television
- Sound Pt 1: Music Surveys, Best-Of Lists, and Guides
- Sound Pt 2: Artist Discographic Chronologies, Audiobooks, and Old-Time Radio Dramas
While a few of the tabs contain hyperlinks to lists from multi-page sites which do not send themselves well to text extraction, I've done my best to embed as much of the information as possible locally in the workbook, itself and to keep the layout consistently uniform to facilitate navigation and clarity.
Unlike the self-published books or the somewhat daunting length of the Journal, this workbook is simple and localizes the data a viewer is most interested in exploring to a single, plaintext sheet for quick and easy reference. The shareability is key to aiding curious listeners/viewers in finding quality content relevant to their interests, and it is simultaneously a tool to empower me to delve into the many areas of my own library which I've yet to explore.
This is a milestone for Innerspace Labs, and I will continue to refine and expand the project into the future.