Hibiki: A Graph Visualization of Asian Music

Abstract

Creating a visualization for a specific subdomain is an arduous task since most commercial visualization tools are often written in a way that allows them to be appli-cable to multiple subject domains. These tools are cer-tainly powerful, but inherently weaker since they were not written with a specific subject domain in mind. Thus, many researchers may want to create their own visualization. The goal of this project is to create a Neo4j data-base and an interactive web interface for a dataset that covers the intricacies of the East Asian Music scene, primarily focused on Japanese music. This paper serves as documentation to help other authors understand the processes involved when designing and creating similar tools. We break the project down into 3 separate compo-nents. First, we introduce the fundamentals of a Neo4j Graph Database and data mapping design decisions. Next, we explore what an ETL process looks like and how to implement it using Ruby libraries. Finally, we look at the design of the graph visualization software, it's components, and key design decisions. We end the discussion with some analysis of the visualization's effectiveness to provide information and how to improve computational efficiency of the visualization.