####Sun Ra’s eclectic and prolific discography, visualized

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[EDIT] Since I first posted this, I updated the visualization with some additional data from allmusic.

With over 1000 recorded songs spanned over more than 100 albums, Sun Ra was one of the most prolific artists of the 20th century. I decided to make a simple visualization of this enormous body of work. I soon realized, this is no easy task. For one, the discography data is confusing to say the least. For a lot of albums, it is unclear who was in the band or where or when it was recorded. The band members themselves often gave conflicting reports regarding these things. I did my best with the data I could find in the discography online.

After that confusion, I had to make a decision about which data to show. I eventually decided I am only going to visualize full-length albums (so excluding singles and records where Sun Ra appeared as guest).

So here it is - a simple timeline of Sun Ra’s recorded work. The albums are positioned on the timeline based on the year they were released (or if they have not been released - when they were recorded). The colors represent the whereabouts of recording sessions. If you hover over specific works, additional information will show up. I might eventually expand it with some more features, but that’s it for now. I hope you like it :).

Let me know what you think!

A few technical details, for those interested. I used d3 library for the actual visualization. To get the data from the website I mentioned earlier, I used import.io (which was a joy to use, if I may add). And finally for parsing and cleaning up, Python was the way to go.