i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Have been running into this link repeatedly these days - a flowchart rendition of the song Hey Jude.

A lot of people I know and don't know seem to love this flow chart. I wonder why?

Is it just an interesting and novel way to look at a song lyric, do we (as humans) like things better when simplified for us - broken down into steps, do we really like our things, even pieces of art, organised?

Secondly, can this approach or learnings from the same lead to a method for extracting useful information from  song lyrics? To add metadata, to take into account a song's temporal character, to separate chorus/phrases or lines that are repeatedly used from the rest etc?

Oh, this also reminded me of this amazing (funny and insightful) TED talk by Ursus Wehrili on tidying up art.

Ursus Wehrli shares his vision for a cleaner, more organized, tidier form of art -- by deconstructing the paintings of modern masters into their component pieces, sorted by color and size.