Item talk:Q20613
Women of Jazz
Background
Semantic Lab began its examination of the representation of women in the jazz historical record in 2014 as a more targeted consideration within the larger Linked Jazz project Linked Jazz. At the time, Linked Jazz had been working with interviews with jazz musicians and journalists to map relationships between musicians and other figures of the jazz world. This legacy project is now referred to as the Linked Jazz Oral History Network project (record | description) to distinguish itself from the Linked Jazz umbrella project (record | description) now in use for several different projects, including the Women of Jazz project.
In an attempt to examine the social networks of the women jazz musicians, Linked Jazz shifted its work from processing a mix of interviews with men and women from the jazz world to only women. It should be noted that this subset of interviews is not explicitly part of the Women of Jazz project, but it is acknowledged here as initiating Linked Jazz’s prolonged engagement to use the tools of information technology to maximize the discoverability of women’s contributions to the history of jazz. (links to documentation, articles? mention of edit-a-thons?)
Project Description
In 2020, Semantic Lab began gathering the names of women jazz musicians from bibliographic materials, newspapers, and primary sources, starting with the members of the historic band International Sweethearts of Rhythm. This ongoing body of work is an effort to leverage semantic web technologies to expose and correct existing gender biases and absences in the jazz historical record.
The “Women of Jazz” project falls under the larger umbrella of “Linked Jazz” projects (record | description). “Women of Jazz” includes subprojects that have a specific scope and include an additional project name, such as “The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Project” (record | description). Please note that musicians may overlap with other parallel projects, for example, Linked Jazz Oral History Network, reflected in individual records under the property “part of project”.