Cryptograss:Connectome/Live Music Archive
What the Live Music Archive (archive.org's etree collection) says about who played with Sam Grisman, and how it says it. This is a survey for a parser; nothing has been built or written to the connectome yet (Justin, #connectome, 9 Nov, block 26,380,430). Checked by blu on 9 Nov against archive.org's search and metadata APIs. All 206 Sam Grisman Project items were read.[unverified]
Counts
- 206 items with creator "Sam Grisman Project", covering 139 show dates. 40 of those dates have more than one item, because several tapers recorded the same night.[unverified]
- 87 of the 139 dates have at least one source whose description names someone besides Sam: a lineup, a "with" line, or a marked guest.[unverified]
- David Grier is the creator of no etree item, but 18 items name him in their descriptions. He appears as a guest with Yonder Mountain String Band, Donna the Buffalo, the Travelin' McCourys, Tony Trischka, Rapidgrass Quintet and the Jason Carter Band, and on Arabesque recordings.[unverified]
The license
The license is set on the band's collection, not on each show. SamGrismanProject's rights field holds the band's own letter to the LMA, dated 27 Jan 2023, giving permission for "public download and noncommercial, royalty-free circulation". That's the taper agreement in writing. Only 2 of the 206 items carry their own licenseurl (CC BY-NC 4.0 and CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). So a parser reads the license from the collection and the item's own field together, and cites both.[unverified]
Structured fields (read as-is)
creator, date, venue, coverage (city), taper, transferer, source (the gear), lineage. Each one is a separate field. The taper is a connectome person too: someone who was there.[unverified]
Who played: free text in description
The lineup is never a field. It sits in the description's HTML, in one of these shapes:[unverified]
- A header and a list. "Lineup:", "Band:" or "The Band -", followed by one name per line, sometimes with "Name-Instrument & Vocals". A guest list can follow it under "special guests :" or "The Guests -".[unverified]
- A "with" line under the band name: "with Max Flansberg and Richie Stearns", "with Dawg (David Grisman)", "with Guests incl Maria Muldauer".[unverified]
- Name - instrument lines: "Peter Rowan - guitar", "Jayna Manning - guitar/vocal".[unverified]
- {{{1}}}[unverified]
- Nothing: many sources give only band, date, venue and setlist. Some notes are about the microphones only.[unverified]
The .txt info files (173 of 206 items have one) mostly repeat the description. The one checked (2023-01-23) has only a setlist.[unverified]
What the parser has to survive
- Name spellings vary from taper to taper: Max Flansberg, Flansburg and Flasburg; Tod and Todd Livingston; Dominic and Dominick Leslie; "Chris J. English" and "Chris English aka Hollywood". The parser copies names as written and merges nothing. A person maps names to pages.[unverified]
- Names broken across lines by the description's HTML, for example "Bryan" / "McDowell".[unverified]
- Several sources for one show: fold them by date and venue, and keep every source's lines, because one taper lists the band and another doesn't.[unverified]
- Placeholders: "with Guests", "Cousins Vinnie and Joe".[unverified]
The parser this calls for
Dumb, like the rest. For each item, it reads the structured fields and the license, then finds lines matching the four shapes above. Each line is kept verbatim, with the item URL as its source. It splits only where the shape is mechanical: "Name - instrument", a header list, and "and" or "&" inside a "with" line. A guest mark is tied to the setlist songs that carry the same symbol. Everything else goes through verbatim for a person to read. The output is the same per-source reading Sideman --album gives, with the show as the record.[unverified]