Dynamic Exploration of Recording Sessions between Jazz Musicians over Time

We present a new system for exploring, in an intuitive and interactive way, a large compendium of data about collaborations between jazz musicians. The system consists of an easy-to-use web application that marries an ego-network view of collaborations with an interactive timeline. We develop a new measure of collaboration strength that is used to highlight strong and weak collaborations in the network view. The ego-network is arranged using a novel algorithm for ordering nodes that avoids occlusion even when the network is frequently changing. Finally, the system is applied to a large, unique, hand-curated data set of recorded jazz collaborations. The system can be accessed at http://mapofjazz.com/socialcom.