This project homage to the legends of blues wouldn't be possible if not for our lucky find: this website archive, chock-full of blues lyrics, created in 1999. Shockingly, we would've had thousands more song lyric files to markup and create intriguing data from if it weren't for the unfortunate "link rot" which plagued the entire site archive. The majority of the links to song lyrics pages became obsolete and therefore dysfunctional as HTML standards outgrew this outmoded goldmine of an archival website. As such, much work was done to scrape the raw text from every song lyric page possible. To do this, we had tremendous help from our lovely mentor and code guru Dr. Beshero Bondar, who created a Python script (link to the GitHub file view) which successfully collected 1,088 song lyrics from the website and scrubbed them of their ancient HTML code. We were then able to use these raw text files created by Dr. B's Python script to produce clean, uniform XML from which we conducted our analyses.
Unfortuantely, due to the "link rot" which affected our source website, our collection of blues lyrics files were confined to the inconsistent parameters of our source. We were not able to obtain any song lyrics files from a few key blues artists. The fact that we cannot represent all of the crucial pillars to the blues in our project is saddening to us, and we want to ensure our viewers that we did not forget about them, and we mean no disrespect to any of the honorable artists that we could not extract data for! Further source-searching and Python-scraping will be done to add more songs from the artists whom we were unable to gather lyrics for as soon as possible.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of some of the blues legends who are not represented in our project (for now!)