Since The Harkive Project started in 2013, thousands of people have kindly contributed stories about their music listening, helping in our attempt to create a snapshot of how we listen in the digital age.

Until now, and apart from some basic statistics, we haven’t made any of the data collected available. Following some help from the very talented Nick Moreton, we now have the first version of the Harkive ‘Data Explorer’. Click on the link below to access the explorer.

http://www.harkive.org/data

Some important points about this version:

• At the moment this version only contains the data gathered from Twitter. As it develops over the coming months we hope to bring in not only the data from other collection methods (Facebook, Tumblr, and so on), but also some useful external data that will provide additional context for the wider story of what happened on the Harkive days in July 2013 and 2014.
• In terms of functionality, the explorer will enable you to search for particular Twitter usernames (including your own, if you contributed in that way) and also to search for keywords. These search functions work together, so if you wish you can search for particular words within the body of tweets from a particular person, you can enter search terms in both boxes.
• Beyond that, you can also select data from a particular year (2013 or 2014) and also search the entire database for mentions of certain formats or services based on a basic list.
• Each of the tweets displayed, and any links to tracks, articles, etc, contained within them, should link out to the relevant external location, and any original images attached to tweets should display.
• The explorer will work on both desktop and mobile devices, but please be aware that if you are connecting to it over anything other than WiFi then it may be a little slow to load. Once the page is loaded, however, is seems to work quite quickly.
• The final element in this early version is the ability to Tweet the results of your search. Please do share these if you find something interesting. It will be useful for us in terms of developing future versions of the interface to have an idea of the sort of things that interest you.

If you have any questions about the explorer, or anything else related to Harkive, please feel free to email. In the meantime, happy exploring.