Item talk:Q21217

Project Description

The Linked Jazz Oral History Network project was an early linked open data investigation by Semantic Lab, which as a research group was at the time called “Linked Jazz”. Started in 2011, Linked Jazz’s early investigations were situated in the field of library science, focusing on the development of linked open data methods and discovery tools applied to digital cultural materials from jazz archives and special collections. Linked Jazz experimented with a variety of resource objects, from photograph collections to musician union lists. The Linked Jazz Oral History Network project was the centerpiece of the Linked Jazz projects. It worked strictly with transcripted oral histories--interviews with musicians and other figures from the jazz world--to graph the social network represented across these interviews as linked open data. Building on the social graph data derived from interviews, Linked Jazz was able to create visualization tools that enabled deeper navigation of the source material (link: Linked Jazz vis tool), as well as provide end users with semantically enabled data that could be interlinked with outside datasets.

In 2018, Semantic Lab began the work of migrating its legacy oral history data from an internal SQL instance to Wikibase. The migration work of the legacy data was completed in 2020. Data from parallel Linked Jazz projects (website link & project description link), as well as project data derived from Semantic Lab projects belonging to other subject domains, are also stored in Semantic Lab’s Wikibase. Storage in Wikibase affords end users the means to access project data both as single entity records as well as queryable data via Wikibase’s SPARQL endpoint (link: SPARQL endpoint). As Semantic Lab’s projects continue to grow, the storage of all project data in Wikibase using a uniform data model enables queries across multiple Semantic Lab projects that can be modulated according to interest: Linked Jazz Oral History Network data only, data from all Linked Jazz projects, as well as wider queries for results that intersect with other Semantic Lab projects. For a full list of Semantic Lab’s Linked Jazz subprojects, please read the Linked Jazz project description (link).

The original Linked Jazz project was conceived as an experiment in building cultural heritage tools for the creation of linked open data and advancement of content discovery. As Semantic Lab works to expand the reuse value of Linked Jazz Oral History Network data, corrections to the legacy data are made directly here on this Wikibase.