Week 2 Blog Post [Lloyd Stohler]

I chose to look at “Linked Jazz” because it was the most question-provoking name to me on the list.

The site provided a way to look at the connections between artists in the Jazz world. The main way of looking at it is through a large connected web of people with lines between representing who has met or spoke fondly of who. There’s also a way of interactively building your own web where the engine auto-finds a connection between 2 different artists (for example, Dave Brubeck popped up as a connection between Doris Duke and Duke Ellington). This interactive element of finding these connecting links is the most useful feature in my opinion as it directly gives you a way of filling in the gaps.

newthing paragrph

Using a series of 50+ different transcribed interviews done by many of the individuals, an algorithm kept track of who mentioned who. When one of these mentions was made, a link between two named datapoints is created in a massive sheet, at least in how I understand it. Also, many of the interviews that have an audio version can be directly listened to on the website. The site is self-admittedly, still in the process of being created. I am personally curious if the connections between individuals are in some way majorly segregated by race, gender or even subgenera of jazz.