You know what I hate? Annual reviews that are published even before December (looking at you, Spotify Wrapped)! What’s the point of summing up the year with (sometimes less than) approx. 90% of the data? So, with things being what they are, we might have to come up with our own annual reviews. In this case, I want to use my Last.fm listening history for 2023.
I have pre-compiled all the so-called “scrobbles” (plays of one track) via Last.
So, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has some nicely precompiled datasets that even seem to be updated on a daily basis. Let’s put them to good(?) use. We’ll use two files because the file with ratings only has unique identifiers that have to be merged with the actual names. I’ve downloaded these files before, so they might be a bit out of date. I am not doing this here, but it might be easy to modify the vroom() calls below to always get the up-to-date data gzipped files directly from the website.
Picking up the pieces Recently, I’ve animated a specific running goal for one year with data from the Strava API. I thought it would also be nice to compare different years within the same animation - in a way you could say that you’re racing yourself over several years.
This only needs some minor modifications to the code I posted before. Data collection stays basically the same, so I’m just re-posting this here.
I find myself counting characters on my screen more often than I feel comfortable doing it. Isn’t it weird to count things by hand when you have the power of R right in front of you? Well, I decided to but a little helper function into my .Rprofile file (i.e. the function is defined with every startup of R and available throughout the session) that cares care of that (and is less error-prone at the same time).
Full disclosure: I did not even have any running goals for 2020. But as it turned out: It has been a good year for running - at least one thing this year was good at. In this post, I want to run you through my R script which creates an animated graph that looks like I had the goal of running 500 kilometres this year (spoiler: I didn’t). This is what the finished graph looks like (for 2020-12-23):
