- The first goal of this project is to uncover meaningful connections between documents and data related to the personal and professional lives of Jazz Artists. The creators of linked jazz did deep research into connections between famous Jazz artist and how they were intertwined through studios, record label, mutual artist and many other ways. For Jazz Musicians of the 40’s up to today, the environments and people that connected them were and are a large part of the culture of Jazz. Linked Jazz through these connections is essentially preserving a sense of the culture of that day- how connections were made, what drew people together etc. One of the goals if Digital humanities is also to preserve culture. The way Linked Jazz preserves it is similar to how a historian might digitize ancient text so that people presently and in the future can clearly see historical and culture connections.
- The second goal of the project is to develop broadly applicable tools and methods for working with Linked Open Data. The Linked Jazz Network Visualization Tool is web-based visualization tool that offers multiple interactive views of the network of jazz musicians based on the triples we’ve generated from processing transcripts. This tool runs on a browser and allows the user to choose different views of the social network and to create a customized dynamic network of selected individuals. It also displays images, videos, and short biographies of jazz musicians within the network. For example, The School of Information at Pratt Institute will develop a prototype of DADAlytics, a modular tool that performs supervised entity extraction from archival documents for generating linked open datasets, lowering barriers to entry for institutions seeking to create linked open data from archival materials.
- In Digital Humanities, the values of accessibility, collaboration, and diversity and inclusion, strongly align with the evaluation of the LinkedJazz Database. For example, the dataset is a list of names extracted from DBPedia, the Linked Open Data version of Wikipedia. At the beginning of the project they created a starter list of names of jazz musicians. This list, comprised of 9300 names, was generated by filtering the DBpedia RDF extracts for Jazz related individuals. They also utilized over 50 transcripts of oral history interviews, from a great pool of universities and libraries. Just analyzing the foundations of this Database, they clearly represent the value of collecting large mass’ of information, and narrowing it down to an accessible source for working with Linked Open Data. In addition to their accessible sources, they also gather conferences and Wikipedia panels to gather more information on the network of Jazz musicians and the search engine algorithm. Within these collaborative discussions, researchers are able to communicate underlying biases on search algorithms such as race and gender. Lastly, this database shares the same values of (DH) diversity and inclusion, by connecting with female jazz musicians and revealing their network within the jazz community. For example, LinkedJazz interviewed Zena Latto’s, a saxophonist connected to Benny Goodman and the NYC jazz scene, added her story to the database shortly before her passing. By actively interviewing individuals of all gender’s we are able persevere the history of these interactions.
