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Gathering the Data: RPA in Action

The first step of my project was to fetch the data from Billboard's Year End Hot 100 list for that. At first I thought it would be easy to gather the information from billboard’s website, but the page was not structured in a way that I could easily change the year and fetch the whole list, so I used Wikipedia instead to fetch the list. Wikipedia provided a table with all the songs, but I had to investigate each year at a time (meaning a lot of copy and paste in a repetitive task...). But repetitive tasks are the most suitable processes for automation, and that was what I did: I used UI Path to create a robot that will retrieve Billboard's Year End Hot 100 from 1980 to 2019 and increment the information with results from Google. It was interesting to build the robot, because I had to overcome some situations that I had not foresaw. I had no problems gathering the list from Wikipedia, my problems started when I was getting the additional information from Google. The full li...

So, what is InfoMusic?

Let’s start at the beginning. According to dictionary.com: “music is an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color”. 2020 will be in the history books for a lot of reasons, but lack of ideas and emotions will not one of them. We had social distancing demanded by COVID-19, the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement all over the world as a consequence of the murder of George Floyd and the demand for social justice are just some of the facts that are making this an atypical year. OK, so why am I telling all this? Because music reflects our feelings and the moment we are living, and when I listening a song mentioning Black Lives Matter one thing came into my mind: What can the most played songs say about a year? Well, this was the trigger to my project, I decided to analyze 4 decades of Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 Singles and check what it can tell me about the world. I have no clue o...

How to create infographics?

Last week I started to deepen my knowledge on data visualization tools, I already known how to use Power BI and Tableau in a simple way, but I decided to study a bit more of its full capacity. As I stared to study and think about data, a fun coincidence happened: I was talking to a good friend of mine and she told me that she was doing an infographics course. In a nutshell, infographics is the combination of text, data, and visuals to pass a message, and there is a lot of ways to publish a infographic, including using the tools mentioned at the beginning. So instead of just studying the tools, I started the infographics course and will combine it all. I’m excited about the project because I know I will have to use different technologies to gather the data and analyze it, but I will also have to use my creativity to make an interesting story and to show it. This project will be called InfoMusic . Stay tunned!