Pattern Recognition

Rec League is, of course, the perfect place to do research for individual items, categories and disciplines. There are so many qualified people giving thoughtful recommendations on and for everything under the sun. What we've found even more helpful than that for our work, is that the broad data set gives us insight into patterns that would otherwise be entirely invisible.

If, for example, we see someone or a few people post beautiful collages — great. The people are buying collages, checking them out in museums etc. But imagine how much more meaningful it is when we see, beyond people posting the actual collages, people posting about the joy in collaging themselves, their favorite craft knives, their preferred mixed media adhesives, local scrapbooking meetups etc all being posted around the same time. Now we're cooking with fire.

As Rec League's user base grows larger, we've been seeing some of these trends start to emerge. Most have been more validation of trends others have seen coming but as that data set grows, I can't begin to imagine interesting the patterns that emerge will become.