Project Overview: Jan 2019-Oct 2021: Linking Lost Jazz Shrines is a collaborative project between the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) and the Semantic Lab at Pratt to create linked open data from the Weeksville Lost Jazz Shrines of Brooklyn (WLJSB) oral history collection, which documents Central Brooklyn’s cultural legacy of jazz between the 1930s and the 1960s. LLJS aims to expand the discoverability and accessibility of WLJSB by adding the influential, yet underrepresented African American people, music groups, organizations, and music venues from the oral history collection to the existing network of jazz musicians from the Semantic Lab’s Linked Jazz Project.

Scope of Work: Linking Lost Jazz Shrines was born from my work digitizing, describing, and creating digital exhibits from WLJSB as an Oral History Intern at WHC in 2018. Seeing the potential to make the collection and the relationships contained therein more discoverable and accessible to both Brooklyn community members and jazz researchers alike, I proposed Linking Lost Jazz Shrines to apply linked data principles to the collection in collaboration with and under the technical guidance of the Semantic Lab at Pratt. In 2019, Linking Lost Jazz Shrines was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's “Collections as Data: Part to Whole” grant, which supported the development of a use model, an implementation model, and a new collection as data. As Co-PI and Project Archivist, I collaborated with project partners to develop and execute workflows to transform the collection into linked open data and cultivate relationships with interviewees and local community members to develop thoughtful programming on Brooklyn jazz legacies. In 2021, continued work on Linking Lost Jazz Shrines received a $15,000 Equity-In-Action grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). 

Features:
How Mapping Relationships Between Jazz Musicians Elevates Unsung Histories

Awards: Weeksville Heritage Center and the Semantic Lab at Pratt received the Archival Achievement Award for the Linking Lost Jazz Shrines project from Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York - October 2020.

Publications: Project collaborators, Zakiya Collier and Sarah Ann Adams have a book chapter, “Ethical Expressions of Collective Memory: Re/presenting Central Brooklyn Jazz Oral Histories as Linked Data,” forthcoming Summer 2023 in the edited volume Ethics in Linked Data from Litwin Books.