ABSTRACT
Digital technologies applied to archives of jazz history have the power to generate datasets that support diverse perspectives and trigger new interpretations and narratives. Moreover, this new approach to historical analysis helps identify lesser represented segments of a community. This chapter presents a series of use cases developed under the auspices of the Linked Jazz Project that bring the often marginalized or forgotten, yet influential, women jazz musicians into the digital historical record. Preliminary analysis of a corpus of digitized jazz oral histories revealed an unevenness in gender representation, which in turn led to a focus on leveraging a semantic technology—linked open data—to promote women jazz musicians and all-women bands. Information about their lives was located and digitally encoded, resulting in the development of new datasets that can be queried, visualized, and merged with other data on the web.
