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”.

Scope

The Women of Jazz project at Semantic Lab stemmed from our work pertaining to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, creating or editing records for the band members on Wikidata and interlinking those records to musician records here on Semantic Lab’s Wikibase. In order to capture other band-related activities of these women found in our readings, we expanded this work to include a similar method of record creation for other all-women jazz bands and ensembles, as well as for the other women musicians in these bands. This required the creation of a larger project category now called “Women of Jazz”.

In this way, our work should not be considered exhaustive or comprehensive. We focus on specific histories or groups of materials that can also serve to guide areas to consider for expansion.

The following tables represent the targeted baseline information for each musician of the Women of Jazz project and each band belonging to the Women of Jazz project. Note: For musicians, band information may be incomplete, for example, instrument information may be missing.

[need to add table for person entity properties here]

Example: Edna Williams

[need to add table for band entity here]

Example: The Hell Divers

For a full list of properties in use in the Women of Jazz project,, please see the Project Data section below.