Visualizing and Analyzing Recorded Jewish Music: Building a Relational Database for Jewish Music Data and Utilizing Tableau for Analysis

• In Event: Introducing the Database of Recorded Jewish Music: A Demonstration of the Visualization and How To Use Tableau

Abstract

Since 2019, our research team at the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience has been aggregating a robust data set of recorded Jewish Music (into a newly built MySQL database) for the purpose of analyzing the considerable corpus of commercial music recordings that reflect the Jewish American experience. The UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music (or DRJM), a living and growing project, is currently comprised of data from four archival collections and a discography, totaling over 131,354 recorded tracks, 19,754 albums, and 30,049 recorded artists and is searchable through a Tableau Public Dashboard. Aggregating these unique materials into a single, searchable location provides for the use of digital humanities analysis and aggregation tools to not only enhance the analytical potential for researchers of recorded Jewish music, but also raise questions of archival practices such as the criteria by which recordings are considered “Jewish,” genre and style biases that influence collection practices, and what “silences” arise from analyzing those practices.
Utilizing the data analytics and visualization software, Tableau, this presentation considers the potentials of aggregation and visualization tools for large scale music data analysis, research, and discovery. An introduction to developing the relational database, addressing the challenges of aggregating unique and differing collections, and a demonstration of the affordances of Tableau as an analysis and discovery tool illustrate the potentials and challenges of digital analysis tools for querying large corpora of humanities/cultural data. The DRJM, from its inception, has been conceived of and developed as a living, expanding project with plans to incorporate data from additional Jewish music collections and to grow the research tool into a comprehensive, discography and research tool for Jewish music.

Author

• Danielle Stein, UCLA, Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience