Announcing the Release of Carnegie Hall Performance History as Linked Open Data

[Rob Hudson]

ANNOUNCING THE RELEASE OF CARNEGIE HALL PERFORMANCE HISTORY AS LINKED OPEN DATA

Carnegie Hall is excited to release its performance history – including data on nearly 45,000 events from 1891 to 2016 – as linked open data under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain data license. Explore the data via our SPARQL endpoint: http://data.carnegiehall.org

Learn more about the data creation and structure in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/CarnegieHall/linked-data

What Does "Performance History" Mean at CH?

Since it opened in 1891, Carnegie Hall has been a center of cultural and political expression. The Hall holds multiple performance spaces, and we present and provide a venue for many different types of music and art. Carnegie Hall events over the past 125-plus years run the full gamut of cultural history: not only have the legends of Western classical music (Marian Anderson, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Arturo Toscanini), jazz (Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk), and rock/pop/hip-hop (The Beatles, Bo Diddley, Lady Gaga, Jay Z) all performed here, we’ve had dance, theatre, world music genres, as well as civic meetings, debates, lectures, film screenings – we even hosted a children’s circus, complete with baby elephants, in the 1930s!

The published data set covers nearly 45,000 of these events, as well as corresponding records for more than 100,000 artists, 20,000 composers and over 85,000 musical works. The breadth and depth of these records illustrate how Carnegie Hall has functioned as a focal point for culture and society: the events mirror what people were listening to, interested in, and thinking about at that moment. The Hall has featured not only the greatest and most famous, but also the less great and not-so-famous — there’s a bit of everything, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Want to help Carnegie Hall improve the performance history data? We welcome feedback, recommendations, sample SPARQL queries, and corrections. See how to get involved here: https://github.com/CarnegieHall/linked-data#get-involved