In the past few weeks, we’ve been working on this projects collaboratively, and overcoming many obstacles together. We have started from knowing nothing about jazz, ended up understanding the fundamental changes it went through in 20th century.

We divide our workflow unconventionally since we started with a broad research, and revised our thesis for multiple times. At the end we decided race was a huge part in jazz, and education was the factor that we thought brought changes to the relationship between jazz and education of jazz musicians.

We adopted DH methods such as GIS, tiemline and multi-media narrative, and organized the structure of the Scalar project in this way. Thus the readers can analyze the changes brought by education in jazz.

Then we decided our tasks based on personal preference, since everyone has his/her own strength, and here are the account from them:

Account from [Georgia]:
Due to the fact that I did not have a technological background of any sort, I favored the more research oriented end of the project. I did a site on WordPress before but Scalar appeared much more complicated to me. The aspect of race within Jazz in Universities peaked my interest so that is what I tried to research. Our exchange with Shelton Berg from UMiami is a nice addition to our project and if we had more time, I would have liked to gather more statistics on the race/gender oriented numbers in jazz programs in Universities today.

Account from [Matt]:
Race instantly sprung to mind when given this project topic. How can one study any part of jazz without studying the racial components of jazz? I was interested in finding the correlation between jazz education, race, and the ongoing development towards social equality. However, we found that there was not nearly as great of an interrelationship between these topics. Race obviously overlaps with both jazz education and social equality, but we were more so looking for the relationship between jazz education and social equality. If we had more time, I would have liked to incorporate more of the history of jazz in regards to racial acceptance. We came across scholarly articles that discussed the racial tension that grew simultaneously with the growth in popularity of jazz music. However, this does not really touch upon the broader topic of jazz education.

Account from [Dehao]:

I’m the one who’s to blame when you have technical problem such as viewing the interview clips, since I was really attracted by the multi-media narrative, and really devoted to embed all sorts of media format as much as I could. I helped to cut the interview clips and set up the transcript player for each one. Besides that, I researched the education as a factor in change of the jazz community, and finding the argument valid though needs more evidence. During the final week of the project, I took the liberty to organize the group tasks and clean up the tasks for each group member, structure of this Scalar project, and organize the process and citation pages.
 

Account from [Zach]:
The most intriguing aspect of this project in my eyes is education. I have learned about "the jazz age" in previous history classes, but was never really taught anything in-depth on jazz particular or the importance it had in developing the American culture. After researching online, navigating several databases, and searching jazz sites I quickly learned that jazz education and jazz history education are both controversial topics. It was interesting reading about different viewpoints and why jazz was met with frequent opposition. The racial aspect was an interesting twist, in that the migration of African Americans north helped in spreading jazz culture throughout America. I found that comparing and contrasting different resources was essential in deciphering the many tales of the rise of jazz education. There are so many different accounts and points of view that it takes a thorough effort to piece the puzzle together.