Giant Steps Toward the Digital Age: Interactive and Collaborative Music History

Interacting with the Inter-web

Good evening, Steemians! In just a few days, I will be defending my thesis, and my brain has been focused exclusively on Philadelphia’s jazz history for what seems like 68 years. To jumpstart my ideas for Philadelphia’s music public history, I want to explore how we can bring the community further into the Digital Age. Currently, most of the city’s public history institutions manage antiquated websites with very little opportunity for community voices to be heard.

_{The cover for John Coltrane's seminal work Giant Steps (1960). Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records.}

While I don’t have a definitive answer for how to drag Philly jazz history into 2018, here are some ideas for interactive, creative, and collaborative digital projects:

1. Create-Your-Own Tour: Inspired by the Ford Museum’s online exhibit creation, this would be an amazing and interactive feature to add to All That Philly Jazz’s website. To encourage children to think beyond their neighborhood, we could ask them to research sites associated with different music styles, historic themes, or just musicians. Using artifacts provided by local repositories and uploaded to the website, students could craft their own walking tour and even interpret the sites using the objects and documents provided.
2. A Digital Public Forum on the Coltrane House: When Pew initially funded a planning grant to explore interpretive opportunities within the John Coltrane House, there was only one community meeting with Strawberry Mansion residents. To increase community engagement, Philadelphia Jazz Project or the Fairmount Park Conservancy should create a forum on their website culminating in a live streamed community meeting discussing the ideas. Additionally, to get students more engaged, educators could visit local schools for Coltrane workshops that explain the importance of the house and encourage them to participate and comment online. Create a hashtag (#savingTrane? #preservingTrane? #JohnColtraneHouse?), and you can connect the jazz preservation activist community even further.
3. Mapping Jazz History (Digitally): There are many sites associated with Philadelphia jazz not on the All That Philly jazz digital map. If given a list of unmarked sites, students and other website users could mine local digital repositories for artifacts related to the clubs and create their own markers.
4. Digitizing the Art Walk: Philadelphia’s Music Alliance is looking to create a companion app for the markers along Broad Street commemorating Philadelphia’s musicians. PMA could collaborate with students to create content or to nominate additional Philadelphia musicians in the neo-soul and hip hop community—currently the markers are dominated by jazz and classical musicians.

The Philadelphia jazz and general public history community needs to not only engage with younger audiences, but also to advance technologically in order to keep them engaged. For more information on how cultural institutions can embrace digital technology, check out the Wyncote Foundation’s Like, Link, Share website.

Let me know what you think of these ideas, and feel free to leave suggestions below!

^{100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History Initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment conducted by graduate courses at Temple University's Center for Public History and MLA Program, is exploring history and empowering education. Click here to learn more.}