calderwood

Since I hope to design a website that contains a collection of blues lyrics from the 1920s and 1930s and allows visitors to search the collection for specific words, I decided to use this week’s assignment to look for other websites that feature collections of blues lyrics.  I conducted my search mainly by exploring the first few dozen results that Google provided when I typed in “blues lyrics.”  Whenever a website featured a large list of links, I also attempted to use these lyrics; unfortunately, more often than not, these links led to sites or pages that no longer existed.

After several hours of searching, I had discovered more than 20 websites that feature a collection of blues lyrics.  None of these sites, however, feature the kind of search capabilities that I imagine for my own website.  Many, in fact, do not feature any search capabilities at all.  For this reason, the website I hope to design will provide a service that, apparently, no other site does.

Even though none of the sites that I found feature extensive search capabilities, it was quite instructive to look the various online collections of blue lyrics.  Here are some of the highlights of my search:

Blues Lyrics On Line:  Google’s first result for “blues lyrics” brought me to Blues Lyrics On Line.  As the “What’s New” page indicates, this site has not been updated since 1999.  The site also has a limited bandwidth, so it became temporarily unavailable just about every other time I tried to visit it.  Despite these limits, I consider it one of the best sites I found.  It contains lyrics to over 500 recorded blues songs.  The songs collected cover just about every time period and musical styles, and they can be browsed by artist or song title. As the homepage indicates, the site’s creator attempted to collect lyrics based on their originality, which means that many obscure songs have been included.

Although the site does not feature any search capabilities, the homepage lists a series of provocative questions such as “Has anybody written a blues song about spaceflight?” and “Is there a blues song that mentions the Kinsey Report?” with a link that leads to the answers.  Aside from to the quality of the collection, I thought these questions (and their answers) were one of the site’s best features.

Harry’s Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online:  Google’s second major result was Harry’s Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online, which contains lyrics to more than 2,500 recorded blues songs.  (Blues Lyrics On Line’s list of links, many of which were no long working, also led me to this site.)  As on Blues Lyrics On Line, the songs collected cover just about every time period and musical style, and they can be browsed by artist or song title.  On this site, however, the collection is, to a great extent, the result of many users’ contributions.  The collection therefore tends to include relatively popular songs, as well as many redundancies resulting from different artists’ recording the same song.  The sheer size of the collection, however, prevents these issues from too much of a drawback.

At the same time, the size of the collection makes browsing a bit more difficult.  On Blues Lyrics On Line allows visitors to view all the songs collected on a single web page, here visitors have to look at several pages.  Still, a much more serious drawback is the amount of advertising connected to the site.  The site is surrounded by advertising and, even worse, my pop-up blocker was constantly blocking pop-up ads as I explored the site.

Despite these drawbacks, Harry’s Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online had several distinctive features to its credit.  In addition to browsing lyrics by artist and song title, visitors can browse by musical style or song topic.  Also, one page contains an extensive glossary of words and phrases in blues lyrics, such as “ball the jack,” “black cat bone,” “jelly roll,” and “riding the blinds.”  Another page contains a list of lyrics and tabs (i.e. musical entablature) that users would like to see.  Site users can contribute to the glossary, request new lyrics and tabs, or supply lyrics and tabs that others have requested.

The Online Blues:  One of the best-looking sites I encountered (mainly because it featured photographs of blues artists along the top of every page) was The Online Blues.  As the updates listed on the homepage indicate, this site has been updated relatively recently.  The size of the collection seems commensurate with Blues Lyrics On Line, but the site focuses on the work of about 30 relatively well-known artists from various time periods and with different musical styles.  On this site, visitors cannot browse by song title; instead, they must click on one of the artists’ names along the left margin of every page to see links to a particular artist’s lyrics.  For most artists, the number of songs for which lyrics are available is less than 20.  The site also contains a form with which visitors can contribute lyrics.

As with Harry’s Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online, the amount of advertising connected to this site represent a major drawback.  Although the site is not surrounded by advertising, it produces pop-up ads and contains links to commercial sites that are in no way related to blues.  (These links are probably the result of the creator’s policy of listing links only to those sites that agree to provide a link to The Online Blues.)  Another drawback is that the lyrics are presented in a kind of single-spaced format that does not give a good sense of stanza breaks.  (This format is probably the result of using a standard form for how lyrics are contributed and presented.)

HarpTab.com:  The “Blues Lyrics” section of HarpTab.com is somewhat similar to The Online Blues.  Like The Online Blues, it contains a list of artist’s links, which in turn lead to links to particular lyrics.  In addition, the lyrics are presented in a format that does not give a good sense of stanza breaks.  HarpTab.com, however, has a couple of advantages over The Online Blues–it features hardly any advertising, and it contains a somewhat larger assortment of artists.

MetroLyrics:  MetroLyrics.com appears to be a kind of clearinghouse for song lyrics.  In other words, the site contains a large database of musical artists, and users can rate particular artists, as well as contribute song lyrics these artists.  Because of the nature of the site, it can only be as good as its users make it.  In the case of its blues section, MetroLyrics is not very good, since the section has received relatively few contributions.

Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo:  From a historian’s standpoint, Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo is the probably the most interesting site I found.  It consists of an online book in progress about African-American folk magic, entitled Hoodoo in Theory and Practice, and a collection of lyrics fore the more than 75 songs to which the book refers.  The site’s creator encourages visitors to contribute lyrics, and includes a list of desired songs to this end.  Of course, since the creator desires lyrics in order to illustrate aspects of African-American folk magic, the thematic range of the songs are relatively limited in scope.  Unlike most of websites I encountered, which are little more than lyrics repositories, the contents on this site reflect a clear and highly fascinating curatorial intention.   

Sites Devoted to Specific Artists:  In addition to the sites list above, I came across several sites devoted to the lyrics of a specific blues artist.  Such sites include A Tribute to Buddy Guy and The Robert Johnson Notebooks. However, since I am more interested in sites that collect the lyrics of multiple artists, I did not look at very many sites in this vein.

Sites Featuring Multiple Musical Genres:  A number of sites feature song lyrics from multiple genres.  MetroLyrics is one example, but other examples include Jazz Lyrics + Blues Lyrics, The Heptune Classical Jazz and Blues Lyrics Page, and Black Cat Rockabilly Europe.  Since the coverage of blues lyrics on these sites tend to be more limited than on sites devoted to blues, I did not look at very many sites in this vein.

One of the assignments for this week was to incorporate the object we had digitized (see image below) in a web page.  I expect that, when it comes out in early March, the Streetprint Engine 3.0 will be perfectly suited for creating a website where I can display digitized versions of my grandmother’s pictures.  Since Streetprint 3.0 is not yet available, I used Dreamweaver to create a rather incomplete mock-up of the website I envision.

This website, entitled Betty’s Photographs, currently consists of only two pages.  From the home page, which contains a portrait of my grandmothers, visitors can hit a link that leads to other snapshots she had collected.  The second page, when it achieves its final form, will contain titles for all the images on the page, links to images of the snapshots’ rear sides, and links to more pages full of images.  If I complete this website using Streetprint rather than Dreamweaver, visitors will also be able to browse through images by subject or date.

Since designing these two web pages represents my first time using Dreamweaver, I ran into several problems.  For example, I attempted to embed reminders to myself in the website’s code, but somehow they always ended up being displayed.  Also, I seem to have managed using a template to recreate the background and heading of the homepage on the second page, but I was pretty unsure of doing.  Again, when I resized images in Dreamweaver, I was unsure whether they would appear too small or too large.  Finally, I am not terribly pleased with Dreamweaver’s ability to create aesthetically pleasing pages.  My guess is, if I continue to use Dreamweaver, I should first design the background of my pages and other content using Photoshop or another similar program.   

Reading the second chapter of  Digital History led me to think more about the logistics of designing a website.  Since I’m thinking more seriously about a website that would allow visitors to search through a collection of blues recordings from the 1920s and 30s, I imagine that such a project would require an XML or database program.  The second chapter only briefly discussed the differences between XML and database program, so I’m still unclear on what makes the two programs different and on which one would be more appropriate for my purposes.

Perhaps a more important question is what kind of server I should access.  Starting out, the easiest thing to do might be to gain access to my school’s server.  Since my website might requires an XML or database program, however, I’m not sure the limited space my school would provide me would, even at the outset, be sufficient.

On the other hand, if the server space turned out to be enough at the beginning, my website might eventually grow so much that the space would no longer be sufficient.  This situation could occur either as I add more text (i.e. blues lyrics) or as I supplement the text with audio files.

Aside from the issue of space, access to my school’s server might discontinue once I am no longer affiliated with the school–which is of immediate concern to me since I’ll be graduating this year.

Despite these concerns, I’m definitely inclined toward making use of my school’s server if at all possible.  Currently, American University is my ISP, so I can’t really imagine accessing any other institutional server right away.  Also, I expect that my web site will start small and only gradually grow, which makes investing in dedicated hosting or a domain name seem frivolous at this point.

If anyone has suggestions or more information regarding any of the concerns I’ve raised, I’d greatly appreciate it.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, a couple dozen snapshots she had taken in the 1940s and 50s came into my possession, mainly because the subjects of these pictures were unfamiliar to my family.  (Of course, I was interested in keeping them for their historical value alone.)  Soon after I acquired them, I made color photocopies on glossy paper for display purposes and buried the originals in a folder in my closet.  Since I know so little about preserving photographs, I often worry about how long the originals will last in my possession.

The digitization assignment provided me with an opportunity to help preserve the originals in an alternate form–as image files.  Earlier this week, I began the preservation process by scanning over a dozen of the originals, using 48-bit color, and saving them as TIFF files.  My choices in depth and file format were dictated by my desire to preserve as much information about these snaphsots as possible.  For the same reason, I chose to scan the pictures’ backsides (many of which had handwritten notes) and refrained from cropping the images.

After an hour or so of making TIFF files, I chose one of my favorites to adapt for display purposes.  This image depicts three women sitting in front of a sign that reads “MEN WANTED.”  For the sake of faster downloading, I saved it as a PDF file.  Since PDF files don’t seem to represent images in 48-bit color (and color is unnecessary for viewing what is essentially a black-and-white image), I saved the PDF file using a 6-bit gray scale.

For the PDF file, I also cropped out several elements that were in the original TIFF file.  I removed the snapshot’s paper border because it does not really add to the image.  I cut out a small letter “S” that appears at the rightmost edge of the sign because it slightly detracts from the “MEN WANTED” message.  Also, “1945″ had been scrawled on the image’s bottom left corner.  Normally, I would want to display such a detail because it helps date the image; however, the back of the snapshot reads “44,” so I decided to eliminate the possibility of any inaccuracies by cropping out the handwriting on the front.

For the sake of preservation and easy access, I’m glad to have this image and its cousins digitized.  After reading about digital preservation, however, I realize that even image files require effort to preserve.  Once I’ve finished scanning all my grandmother’s pictures, I’ll make sure to save them on my hard drive and on a CD.  Even then, I’ll routinely make backups of the images and review my hard drive and CDs for signs of degradation.

In the last week or so, I’ve come up with a few ideas for a possible web site.  Unfortunately, each of these ideas involves its own set of problems, difficulties, and complications, so I’m not sure whether any of them are worth pursuing.

My first idea was to create a web site that would serve as a complement to my master’s thesis.  My thesis involves representations of African Americans in film noir from the 1940s and 1950s, so, ideally, a web site could help illustrate my thesis by including still images/streaming video from particular films in which African Americans appear.  I imagine, though, that such a project would run against copyright issues.  From a legal standpoint, how safe would it be to include small samples from these films?  Even if such a project would not place me in any significant jeopardy, I don’t think I currently have the hardware or expertise to even copy a still image from a movie already on DVD.

Another way a web site could (vaguely) complement my thesis is by collecting other people’s stories.  In this case, my focus would not be African Americans in film noir so much as people’s experiences viewing film noir.  It might be interesting to learn how different people first learned about film noir, what was the first film noir they ever watched, and how they define noir.  Although, as far as I know, no one has bothered to collect people’s stories about film noir, it is already the subject of countless web sites.  This situation might make it difficult for potential visitors to find my site.  I’m sure I could get a few people’s stories through word of mouth, but how would I proceed to collect even more stories?

Leaving aside the subject of film noir, I also though about providing lyrics from blues recordings from the 1920s and 1930s.  I know that many of these lyrics have already made their way into print, and that many of these recordings have been digitized, but I’m not sure whether anyone has bothered to provide, in machine-readable text, the lyrics from a large selection of blues recordings online.  Such a project would allow people to do quick searches for specific words among a large selection of songs, thereby enabling new forms of scholarship.  Assuming that such a project has not already been done and that I went about doing it, then I would run against the problems inherent in transcribing the lyrics of musical recordings: how can I be sure I am hearing the right words?  The fact that these particular recordings are often full of pops and crackles, not to mention that they are often sung in deep Southern accents, makes accuracy even more difficult to achieve.  Besides the difficulty of ensuring accuracy, I would also have to confront the problem of how to register the accent of the singer faithfully while still making the lyrics easy to search.  For example, in one song, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup pronounces “questionaire” as if it were “question-air-ee,” but if I wrote the word that way, then a person looking for “questionaire” would not be able to find this particular song.

If anybody has a response or feedback to any of these ideas and questions, I’d greatly appreciate hearing it.