Introduction Urban Legends, or Contemporary Legends, are a type of folklore popularized by Jan Harold Brunvand in his book: The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. Urban Legends are considered to be the modern continuation of the human tradition of folklore and legends. Folklore does not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies, and by studying modern folklore in the same way that we study the folklore of traditional societies, we can also learn about modern societies(Brunvand 2003).

Research Proposal on Urban Legends and the Internet Introduction “Urban Legends” is a genre we often confer to fictional and semi-fictional stories that circulate through modern communities. Generally this describes stories that few people truly believe, but are still told and retold time and time again. These stories often have common features, they leverage the unintuitiveness of modern life, a sense of distant credibility (“This happened to a friend of a friend”), and in some cases a sociopolitical call-to-action.

Introduction The internet has allowed any artist to share their work with the world, and in many cases be paid for it. This is mostly a recent development, with the creation of online marketplaces, and patronage services. The defining marketplace for the indie music scene on the internet is Bandcamp. Although it has been difficult to find an estimate for how large this marketplace actually is, Bandcamp does report some information about how much money has been spent on their platform.

Preliminary Analysis This will document the process of doing preliminary analysis on bandcamp album covers. This is part of an ongoing project which can be found here and on github. The goals of this exploration are to look into the viability of using machine learning methods in this setting. Selected methods will be fully automated and utilized for the final analysis. The './covers/' directory was generated from the album_cover_scrape function.

This is a project to look into the question: How do indie musicians use visual signs to indicate their subgenre? The main functions are in bandcamp_webtools.py, and do basic web scraping. Analysis will be done in the jupyter notebooks Proposal.ipynb, Prelims.ipynb, and Analysis.ipynb. These will also be uploaded as blog posts to my website. The github repository can be found here. The Exploratory analysis (corresponding to Proposal.ipynb) can also be found at this blog post.