Linked Jazz, maintained by the Pratt Institute School of Library Information Science, studies and analyzes various jazz musicians’ connections using primary documents. The website supports a network visualization tool, a crowdsourced research tool, and a basic code to create the program and explain how the programmers made the source.
Linked Jazz is based on an innovative program that can use primary sources to find new connections between artists.
- First, the program scours primary sources, in the form of transcripts of oral interviews from other musicians, for names on a directory of people who have been identified already. These primary sources are found at museums (such as the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.,) archives and libraries across the United States.
- When the program finds the name of the speaker in the transcript, it highlights the name. When the program finds a different name, on the network or not on the web, it highlights this name differently for relationship processing.
- During relationship processing, the project employs volunteers who read contextual cues and establish relationships between artists. Once this is done, the connection gets added to the network, and the web’s size increases.
The network visualization tool is presented as a large web, with many artists linked together. If you hover on an artist, you can see helpful information discussing facts (such as birthday and contributions to the jazz genre) along with an excerpt of a performance.
After clicking on the artist, you can see a close-up of their connections to other musicians. If you click on a connected musician, you can see the source that explains their relationship.
The crowdsourced research tool, called “Linked Jazz 52nd ST,” is presented as a grid of musicians’ profiles. When you click on a musician, you read the interview transcript and are asked about the relationship between the musician and another linked musician.
The goal of the project is to find connections between jazz musicians and to make artist research easier. This tool would be useful for the novice, like me, but more so for ethnomusicologists who study jazz music, current jazz musicians, or historians studying artists.
Hi Phoebe! This project sounds super interesting. It’s awesome that you were able to find out how the program actually finds connections between musicians by searching through things like transcripts of interviews. I think it’s also really cool that the code for the program is open source since that really helps the project feel collaborative and transparent in a way that some other projects don’t.