This artwork explores the frequency of break-up related lyrics. I have chosen to do this to disect the reuptation of Swift, in understanding repeating vocabularly in her body of work. In order to make this artwork, I created a list of words which included phrases such as "goodbye, "break", "miss you","end" etc. These words tend to be linked to the idea of ending relationships. It is no secret that the media has scrunitzed Taylor's love life.
Swift has been know to write songs about relationships featuring obvious references to well know partners. This is seen in songs such as All Too Well (10 Minute Version) in which Taylor references her 21st birthday being ruined by a partner or "Would've, Could've, Should've" from her latest album Midnights, which details a massive age gap between Swift and John Mayer. In chosing the songs for this artwork, I used tracks which are notorious for being about her partners and collected frequently featured songs from spotify playlists about breakups. I have also added songs from throughout her disocgraphy meaning lyrics date back to 2009 and others are as recent as October 2022.
Ideally, I would have like to make an artwork consisting of ALL tracks by Taylor Swift. This examination weights API calls and therefore using CSV data would go against the brief. The limited list is already quite heavy on rendering data for the console and therefore for optimization purposes, the scope of the artwork has been limited. I also had to adapt to using a new and slower API from RapidAPI. The reason for this is that the Spotify API requires limited sign in for uses of the web API that are entirely server-side. This was concerning for marking purposes but also required constant deployment to check changes are working. I realized that while the official Spotify API is alot faster, this slower API allows for easier calling and anyone can view this chart. Parsing and looping through the data was quite a struggle yet I was determined to get a working lyric counter. This consisted on learning to remap JSON and handle complexly nested data.