3 results found

1. De-dupe and standardize data

   I would prefer a focus on completely de-duping and standardizing the existing data before adding any new features.

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   started  ·  AdminConcert Archives Support (Support Team, Concert Archives) responded

   Hi everybody, I thought I'd give you all an update on this one. 

   
   

   We've done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years, but this is the sort of project that is going to be ongoing pretty far into the future.

   
   

   Things that have been done:

   • Added the 'Report Issue' functionality to the website (in the navigation) where users can report duplicates that they come across
   • Added admin tools to merge duplicate Bands/Venues/Locations/Concerts when we find them or when a user reports them.
   • Created 'aliases' behind the scenes for Bands/Venues/Locations so that any duplicates that we merge won't pop up again in the future as duplicates.
   • We now verify locations against the external Geonames database to standardize them.
   • Implemented a location verification step after a concert is created to prompt the user to verify and standardize the location that they entered.
   • Reviewed all of the locations (about 25,000 at the time) about 2 years ago to standardize them and merge duplicates
   • Created an automated system that runs daily that checks for duplicate concerts and merges them together if they have matching bands/dates/locations/venues.
   • Created 'nonstandard concert types' to ensure that we don't merge seemingly duplicate concerts together in cases where one was an 'Early Show', 'VIP Event', etc.
   • Started collecting venue data from Google Maps and Pollstar in preparation for standardizing venues.
   • Started collecting band data from Musicbrainz, Spotify, Last.fm, and Pollstar in preparation for standardizing bands.
   • Probably more things that I'm forgetting at the moment :)

   
   

   Rethinking how we standardize venues:

   Our approach when we started working on standardizing venues turned out to be much more labor intensive than we thought.

   
   

   Our original approach was to compare the venue information we have in Concert Archives to the information we gathered from Google Maps. This seemed reasonable but we soon realized that we'd need to manually verify the information from Google Maps to make sure it was actually correct rather than a similarly named venue or a new venue name rather than the historic venue name or similar issues. The amount of data (over 300,000 venues) and time involved in manually confirming the Google Maps data ourselves wasn't feasible. From there, we tried to split the work up and have our Patreon members help review individual cities but even then we'd still need to review their work, so it didn't really lessen the workload.

   
   

   So standardizing venues has been on the back burner for awhile but we do have more ideas about how to tackle this better. One thing that we've already started doing is collecting venue data from one of our other data providers (Pollstar). By comparing our Venue data against the data of both Google Maps and Pollstar, it may be easier to confirm the data matches since we have 2 outside opinions and may better be able to make automated assumptions to the data accuracy.

   
   

   Another idea that we have is feeding all of the venue data into an AI system and having it make recommendations on duplicate listings.

   
   

   So yeah, standardizing venues has been an open project for a long time. We'll solve it eventually but needed to move it to the back burner so that we can do more pressing projects until we come up with a more feasible way to solve it.

   
   

   Things that we'll be working on in the future:

   • Standardizing Venues as I just laid out
   • Standardizing Bands in a similar way to what we figure out for venues.
   • Adding 'Location Aliases' to Venues. Currently when we create Aliases for venues, they will only be merged together when the venues have the same location. So for example, "Redrocks" and "Redrocks Amphitheater" will automatically merge together when there is an alias as long as they are both associated with the "Morrison, Colorado, United States" location. The locations need to be the same to make sure we don't accidentally merge legitimate venues that have the same name but different locations (like "Hard Rock Live" in Dallas vs "Hard Rock Live" in LA). The issue is when users commonly put in the wrong location for a venue like they do with Redrocks, putting it as Denver rather than Morrison, Colorado. In this case our plan is to create "Location Aliases" for venues so that we can set aliases to make sure that a Denver Redrocks listing always gets automatically merged with the correct Morrison Redrocks venue.
   • It's been awhile since we've reviewed the non-standardized Locations, so we're going to do another pass through those (currently about 27,000 non-standardized location listings).
   • Probably more things that I'm forgetting at the moment :)

   
   

   So yeah, we've been working away on all of this stuff, it just takes time and a lot of nuance to handle data standardization accurately and on a large scale. Just because we don't post public updates very often doesn't mean things aren't happening behind the scenes 😅

   
   

   Thanks everybody for being a part of Concert Archives!

   
   

   --Justin

   Hi everybody, I thought I'd give you all an update on this one. 

   
   

   We've done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years, but this is the sort of project that is going to be ongoing pretty far into the future.

   
   

   Things that have been done:

   • Added the 'Report Issue' functionality to the website (in the navigation) where users can report duplicates that they come across
   • Added admin tools to merge duplicate Bands/Venues/Locations/Concerts when we find them or when a user reports them.
   • Created 'aliases' behind the scenes for Bands/Venues/Locations so that any duplicates that we merge won't pop up again in the future as duplicates.
   • We now verify locations against the external Geonames database to standardize them.
   • Implemented a location verification step after a concert is created to prompt the user to verify and standardize the location that they entered.
   • Reviewed all of the locations… more

2. Add a time field in addition to date

   Being able to indicate the time of the show in addition to the date would be beneficial. I'm still just beginning to enter my concerts, and I have already encountered a couple of times where this would have been helpful.

   Reasons/Examples:
   1) Some artists will do 2 shows on the same day when there's enough demand to add an additional show, but not enough days on their schedule to add extras. E.g. Garth Brooks doing multiple shows on same day - a 1:00 pm and a 7:30pm on a Saturday. Two separate shows & separate tickets = a need for separate entries, and an easy way to tell them apart.

   2) Multiple performances on same day at a non-music festival. E.g. Texas Scottish Festival is not a musical festival, but they do have artists perform. A band might perform different sets on the same date, so a way to indicate which performance(s) were attended.

   3) As a way to order multiple performances on the same date within our concert lists. E.g. I have attended multiple different concerts on the same date (different venues, different artists, different tickets, etc.). While I will have them all listed separately, having the time of each show displayed with the date would make it make more sense to a stranger viewing my list and seeing 5 different concerts on the same date. (5 in one day is my personal record, with shows at ranging from 7:00am to 10:00pm.)

   At the moment, I'm adding the time to the concert title, but that's an inelegant solution. It would be nice to have a separate field for the time.

   Being able to indicate the time of the show in addition to the date would be beneficial. I'm still just beginning to enter my concerts, and I have already encountered a couple of times where this would have been helpful.

   Reasons/Examples:
   1) Some artists will do 2 shows on the same day when there's enough demand to add an additional show, but not enough days on their schedule to add extras. E.g. Garth Brooks doing multiple shows on same day - a 1:00 pm and a 7:30pm on a Saturday. Two separate shows & separate tickets = a need for… more

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   started  ·  AdminConcert Archives Support (Support Team, Concert Archives) responded

   We're working on this!

   
   

   One thing we've found is that entering a time can be kind of subjective though. For example some people might enter the time that the doors open, or when the concert was scheduled to start, or when the concert actually started, or when the headliner went on.

   
   

   Rather than give the option to enter any time, our plan is to add options for "Non-Standard Times". For example if the concert was an "Early Show" or an "After Party" or a "VIP Soundcheck". That sort of thing.

   
   

   Our hope is that solves the problem of false-positive duplicate concerts being merged together because they share all the same date/location/venue/band while also not creating a bunch of "real duplicate" concerts due to slightly mismatched times.

3. Enable adding videos directly onto the website (from your laptop, tablet or phone).

   This feature would give you the opportunity to upload videos you made to a concert, even if you don't work with YouTube to store all your concert videos.

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   started  ·  AdminConcert Archives Support (Support Team, Concert Archives) responded

   We've began working on this! The primary reason we never pursued this is because of the cost involved but we think we've found a solution that will make it affordable.  If it still turns out to be too expensive to host videos directly, we may make this a 'paid' feature for users but our hope to to make this free for everybody. Stay tuned :)