African Diaspora Music Project
Client:
Dr. Louise Toppin, University of Michigan
Industry:
Education, Non-profit
Project Role:
Account and Project Management, Visual Design
The African Diaspora Music Project was founded as a research tool to help singers find art songs for performance. In collaboration with RyOne, Inc., we were tasked with creating a database that users could seamlessly search nearly 4,000 titles collected over 20+ years, by Dr. Louise Toppin. Until this project, this genre of music was spread over a handful of web and privately owned databases.
In total, I have led a team of designers and developers through 3 iterations of this research tool:
The first iteration of this project was built using Omeka and Microsoft Excel with one data set. It allowed users to publicly to search the collection of titles and composer bios within Vocal Repertoire, in one place. In order to add to the database, system administrators used excel and a developer would later administer a mass update.
The second iteration of the project introduced a new dataset, Orchestral Repertoire. Both datasets used the same common data points of the composer name and title of the piece, but all other data points were vastly different. Each dataset required the development of different filtering and search criteria options.
As the database grew in complexity and requirements, it would require a different solution. The third and latest iteration of the database (pictured below), introduced another dataset, Instrumental Repertoire. We built this iteration using Drupal and Airtable. This allowed greater flexibility for manipulating and controlling the each data set and also increased security and automated data uploads through Airtable. I served as the account and project manager for all iterations of this projects, and also created the database’s visual design.
