Equity in Action Recipient Presentation: Pratt Institute and Weeksville Heritage Center

Linking Lost Jazz Shrines (LLJS) is an ongoing collaboration between the Weeksville Heritage
Center and the Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute to investigate the application of linked open data
technologies to the Weeksville Lost Jazz Shrines of Brooklyn (WLJSB) oral history collection.
This rich collection documents Central Brooklyn’s cultural legacy of jazz history between the
1930s and 1960s. The primary aim of the project is to make the WLJSB archival collection more
discoverable and accessible to researchers and the general public alike. The project also
enriches and expands the existing network of jazz musicians developed by the Linked Jazz
Project with an infusion of influential, yet lesser-known artists and the venues where they
performed. This presentation discussed the workflows, Sélavy tool development, data modeling,
and ethical decision-making involved in the transformation of textual archival documents into linked data.

View a recording of the webinar here.