Women Composers in Jazz

Another DH Method

          A method we though that would be interesting to implement in our project is a digital mapping/spatial humanities mix. We took out inspiration from the DH project “Twitter in Real-time” through Hypercities. Our idea, although not the most realistic given our time and capabilities, was to drop pins in each of the areas the women are from, significant areas where the played or taught students, and seeing what outside people and others who had the experiences of meeting them and hearing them play had to say about their legacy and impact. When the user clicked on a certain location, for example Slough, England, they would see what people thought of Marian McPartland and how her influence impacted that region. Through this source, we could see the larger picture of these women in jazz. It would add greater depth and meaning to their legacy by mapping their influences and seeing just how great the significance of women in jazz truly is.
 
            While we tried to start our mapping, we realized how hard it would actually be. We started off with where the women are from and where they spent a large portion of their career and where their influence began. However we saw the complications that quickly arose. Theirs is no easy way to find every place where these women played throughout their lives. Some gig locations are written down, but some private gig locations are not public knowledge.
 
            A more obvious complication is the historical aspect and feasibility of being able to get opinions from people in the mid 20th century about these women and their influence. With the advancement of technology, if this process was to be about women in music now, it would be much more feasible to find opinions of various groups and regions due to social media, however that is not the case for the women we studied. We could go through newspaper clippings and articles written about reviews of the gigs these women played but it would be very sparse. With that complication, we saw that this task would take hours upon hours of research. Although we were excited about our idea to see how deeply these women influenced others and how large their impacts actually were, we more importantly realized the stress and time dedicated to DH methods such as mapping or spatial humanities. While our digital mapping efforts and results were not as we hoped, we learned the difficulty behind implementing these methods in DH projects.