#29: Cover Bank at 5k

Between Eseosa and Jessica, we’ve uploaded 5,000 Nigerian album covers to an Airtable database. For now, I’m going to pause here.

They identified 577 designers for 2704 covers and this is definitely one of the more interesting things about the collection.

Ibukunola Printers, for example, seems to have been super prolific back in the day. Almost 10% of the covers we’ve scraped were produced there and yet, there’s no trace of it today. It’s quite sad-interesting.

A lot of this data has also been scraped off the internet, so I don’t overly trust it, but it’s a good visual collection to browse through.

Short term, I see the opportunity to open it up for contributions to review, complete, add to or explore the data, but I don’t have time tbh.

Long term (if I continue working on this), next steps will be to:

• Build a model to tag the images by colour, subject, e.t.c. For now, we only tag by artist, year, format and genre.
• Figure out how to scrape the internet for more. I don’t think it scales to manually do this curation.
• Make it into a proper database / site like https://beta.flim.ai. But again, no pressure.

I hope someone finds it useful as is.

👉🏾 wuruwuru.com/covers