PDF] Disciples of the Heinous Path: Social network structure and genre hierarchy in Heavy Metal

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Last updated 16 abril 2025

PDF] Disciples of the Heinous Path: Social network structure and genre hierarchy in Heavy Metal

An extensive data-set from Encyclopaedia Metallum, a Heavy Metal band archive, was used to test the hypothesis whether or not the social network structure is influenced by a hierarchy of genres, and results remain inconclusive. Organization of social networks has been studied extensively viewed through the lens of inter-personal relations. However, the aim of this exploratory study is to find if there are different, domain-specific factors in play influencing the structure of the social network. As a case study, an extensive data-set from Encyclopaedia Metallum, a Heavy Metal band archive, was used to test the hypothesis whether or not the social network structure is influenced by a hierarchy of genres. Attempts were made to recategorize bands according to genre and to counter the fluid nature of the data, after which a Word2Vec analysis and hierarchical clustering was performed, the latter using the number of shared artists between bands as distance metric. A range of histograms where generated to gain insight into the distribution of genres, along with a colored dendrogram to see how genre distribution converges. While the Word2Vec results do show some interesting results with regards to stylistic clustering, the results from the hierarchical clustering remain inconclusive. A number of issues have been identified to address in future research.