After working on it for a week straight, I have completed my Daft Punk Article / Interview Database. In this blog post I explain why and how I made it. When I became a fan in 2013/2014 I learned a lot about Daft Punk through old forums on The Daft Club and reading magazines and interviews on Daft Punk Anthology. Today both of these sites are somewhat broken and it is hard to extract information from them like one used to be able to. I found myself constantly having to use the Wayback Machine in order to find things that were once easy to find. Additionally, a lot of content from YouTube has also been getting taken down in recent years. Because of all of this, I feel it has become much harder to research and learn about Daft Punk. I thought to myself, "why don't I create a database of everything I can find, that way I don't have to go search for it every time I need that information. I could just go to the database and it'll be there." So with plenty of free time, I set out to work. First I had to determine what my criteria would be for things to include / exclude. I decided that I would include any interview they did, whether it be via text, audio, or video. I'd also include any article that included a statement (no matter how short) from Daft Punk but only if that statement was made specifically for that article and not taken from a previous interview or article. Basically, any time Daft Punk said something, I'd include it. I also decided to include statements by their close friends and collaborators where they talk about something Daft Punk said or did in detail. Halfway through, I decided to include a few more recent articles about important events (i.e. Daft Punk's pop-up shop and Daft Punk's 2019 Technologic exhibit) because Daft Punk never really made any statements to the press about those things. And finally I decided to include Daft Punk's official websites over the years (i.e. daftpunk.com, daft-musique.com, human-after-all.tv, etc...). I started out by Googling "Daft Punk Interview" and finding all of the surface level articles / interviews that anybody could find. Then I changed some of the search criteria and used some different key terms in order to find some of the more difficult-to-find stuff. Whenever I found an article on a website with a search function, I'd search for any additional articles where Daft Pun made statements. I found that many articles are basically just ripped straight from other outlets so occasionally I'd have to go down a rabbit hole of finding the original publication to publish a specific Daft Punk quote. If I was lucky, an article would just link to the original but sometimes it would be a dead link and I'd have to use the Wayback machine to retrieve it.
I'm sure there are more article / interviews / websites that I am missing but I will be adding those as I remember them or come across them. In the coming weeks I will also work to make sure every link in my database is archived so that if a page dies, it can still be accessed. Overall there are upwards of 400 items in the database right now and I am happy with that.
2 Comments
|
AuthorI am a massive Daft Punk fan and collector. I enjoy researching and writing about their career and I have a bachelor's degree in history. Professional inquiries email me here. Archives
August 2022
Categories |