As jazz music evolved alongside sound recording technology and the record industry, so too did the study and cataloging of sound recordings, or discography. From the early discographies of Charles Delaunay through the work of Brian Rust, Tom Lord, and many others, jazz discographers have published thousands upon thousands of pages of highly structured data about jazz records and jazz musicians.
The free database software BRIAN (in honor of Brian Rust), by Steve Albin, allows users to compile their own discographies in the Rust style and easily output this information as HTML. By web-scraping and parsing this data, we can visualize musicians’ performance and recording careers, and better understand the professional relationships of working musicians. Continue reading Visualizing jazz discography