15 January 2013 · matching pazz
¶ 2012 Pazz & Jop · 15 January 2013
The 2012 Village Voice Pazz & Jop music-critics poll is now out. As has been the case for the last few years, I did the data-correction and tabulation for it. The results of this work are here:
· The Voice's P&J home
· My piece about statistics and analyses
· My massive stastistical hyperindex to the last 5 years of the poll
· My own ballot
The short version: Frank Ocean, Carly Rae Jepsen. If the former of these surprises you, you probably aren't paying attention to music criticism. If the latter, you probably aren't paying attention to pop. Neither of these are life flaws, mind you. But now you have a chance to catch up.
PS: This poll used to be tabulated by people. This is not what people are good at. Eventually computers were employed to help count, but cleaning up the data so it could be counted by computers still took several person-weeks of unpleasant human effort. Then some coworkers and I spent in the neighborhood of 25 person-years building a data-correction and -analysis system with which the whole thing could be done in about 3 person-days. Then Google bought the company for which we made that thing, and shut it down. So I spent about 4 person-days writing a new correction/analysis system from scratch myself, with which this year's poll took about 4 hours to correct and tabulate. Including fixing a few stray errors that the previous system missed.
There is a moral in there somewhere.
· The Voice's P&J home
· My piece about statistics and analyses
· My massive stastistical hyperindex to the last 5 years of the poll
· My own ballot
The short version: Frank Ocean, Carly Rae Jepsen. If the former of these surprises you, you probably aren't paying attention to music criticism. If the latter, you probably aren't paying attention to pop. Neither of these are life flaws, mind you. But now you have a chance to catch up.
PS: This poll used to be tabulated by people. This is not what people are good at. Eventually computers were employed to help count, but cleaning up the data so it could be counted by computers still took several person-weeks of unpleasant human effort. Then some coworkers and I spent in the neighborhood of 25 person-years building a data-correction and -analysis system with which the whole thing could be done in about 3 person-days. Then Google bought the company for which we made that thing, and shut it down. So I spent about 4 person-days writing a new correction/analysis system from scratch myself, with which this year's poll took about 4 hours to correct and tabulate. Including fixing a few stray errors that the previous system missed.
There is a moral in there somewhere.