The Pazz & Jop Data Blog

The 2009 edition of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll was data-corrected and tabulated in Needle™, our new database system designed to be a radically more useful environment for building and understanding sets of data. The Village Voice has published the results of this tabulation, but if you're interested in this data, either for its own sake or as an example of what a new data system might look like, we invite you to explore it for yourself:

Needle data explorer: Pazz & Jop 2009

Tabulating Without Misery

If you've ever tried to tabulate more than a page or two of human-entered data, you will have learned three things:

Humans are erratic.
Computers are pedantic.
Database software seems almost universally designed to inflict #2 on #1.

Needle is an attempt to do a data system differently: to use computer efficiency and precision to magnify human efforts and quantify human insights, and actually alleviate human tedium and misery instead of vindictively cataloging it.

Data In, Better Data Out

There are three ways to get data into Needle: type it in yourself, import it from some structured format (usually CSV or XML), or scrape it off the sort-of-structured web. For the Pazz & Jop we did some of all three.

Thread: An Introduction

Needle's data-exploration and analysis run, behind the scenes, on the system's query language, called Thread. A Thread query describes a path through the data, much like the one you would follow as a person browsing a web site: starting somewhere and then doing something: following paths, diving further down some that seem promising, backtracking out of ones that don't lead where you want. Here's an introduction to how it works.