What is Linked Jazz?
Linked Jazz is a research project that focuses on uncovering connections between data related to the personal and professional lives of historical jazz artists in order to format and show relationships between musicians and reveal their community network.
Breakdown of Linked Jazz
Sources: The Linked Jazz team experimented with the content of interview transcripts and generated new triples based on data rather than converting existing metadata. The interview transcripts come from the Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies Archives, Smithsonian Jazz Oral Histories, the Hamilton College Jazz Archive, UCLA’s Central Avenue Sounds series, and the University of Michigan’s Nathaniel C. Standifer Video Archive of Oral History.
Processes: The Linked Jazz team used the interview transcripts to create Linked Open Data (LOD), a blend of Linked Data and Open Data, meaning it is linked and uses open sources. Linked Data is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. Open Data is data that can be freely used, re-used, and redistributed by anyone. To create Linked Open Data, the Linked Jazz team used a transcript analyzer, a name mapping and curator tool, and a crowd-sourcing tool. The tools were used together to find names mentioned during the interview in order to assign a positive identification to each, using online resources like DBpedia and VIAF.
Presentation: The Linked Jazz project has a “Network Visualization” section (header image) that shows many jazz artists and a web of their connections to other jazz artists, discovered through the Linked Jazz project. You can hover over any of the artists and it will make all of the web transparent except for the lines connected to that artist (pictured below).
Additional Question
One question that I had while learning about the Linked Jazz project was, is there a way to determine the strength/significance of the connections linked visually?
9 thoughts on “Analysis of Linked Jazz”
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I’m still a little confused as to what defines two artists as “linked.” Are they linked if they knew each other, influenced each other musically, shared similar influences, were liked by similar groups of people, or some combination?
Hi Rowen, I was also confused about this at first. After a little bit more research, I found that any of several possible relationships between artists are necessary for a link to be formed. For example, if two artists have met, are acquaintances, are friends, collaborated, or many other types of relationships, they would have a link. Hope this answers your question!
Oh ok, so it’s more about personal relationships, not just influences. Thanks for the answer!
I think you give a really clear explanation of what this project is about, and it is cool that data analysis can be used to make connections between artists. However, I have the same question as you. The project provides us with a network visualization that is easy to understand. I’m confused about whether there is a way to determine the strength of the connections though. For example, does the length of each link indicate something about the strength?
Linked Jazz is definitely an interesting visualization tool. I’m intrigued by the concept of linking multiple figures in the jazz world together and looking at the giant web that’s been created. However, I remember looking at this tool and being confused by the differing colors between individual connections. Are they grouped into certain categories? Also, how are the origins of the connections decided, as in what jazz figure do the connections spread out from and why? Other than that, I believe you gave a good overview of Linked Jazz.
I only briefly looked at this project before reading your response, so I appreciate your explanation. Along the same lines as your question, perhaps the strength of connections could be visualized by the ‘thickness’ of the edges between the nodes. Although that has the potential to become too cluttered. Perhaps, the position of the nodes is already significant? Maybe one artist being closer to another indicates the strength of their connection.
Though I finally decided to focus on the Rhythm of Food, Linked Jazz was the first project that came to my interest. However, just as the previous comments and Will yourself mentioned, I was confused about how the project define “linked.” Your post and comment really help me a lot in understanding this project!
This project honestly reminds me somewhat of the 6 Degrees of Francis Bacon project, which is interesting in it’s own right. I wish you had gone over some of the important links in the project to give some definitions, I think that would have been helpful in clearing up all of the questions that others have had about what being “linked” means. I appreciate your response to help clear it up!
This project style seems like it has unlimited potential in how you can configure/connect different points of data in a dataset. This is the kind of tool that becomes more useful as its sphere of interest increases. Well done on the blog post, Will!