Our project was inspired by Dr. Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. In the book, Davis transcribes the lyrics of songs by salient blues artists to craft a dimension of American history that celebrates and uplifts the narratives of Black women. One of the main themes of Davis’ book is the idea of consciousness raising and how music can act as a catalyst not only for social change, but also for community building. Rainey and Smith sang about love in all forms—salacious, unrequited, abusive—giving weight to the frustrations of women that were not present in popular music and transforming them into a shared experience. Davis believed these blues songs contributed to an “alternative consciousness” of women, which encouraged intimacy and sexual expression. The next question was—how are we going to reflect this in our code? We decided on three primary XML elements—”description,” “action” and “cause,” to illustrate the interpersonal experiences of the songs’ women subjects. We also had secondary XML elements— “mental health,” “relationship” and “money,” to outline potential effects on their daily lives. Each group member selected five songs to markup and we modified the schema after a preliminary examination of the songs and their themes. After the markup, we peer reviewed each others’ songs to make sure we were all using the XML elements the same way. Our corpus is a little unconventional—we found the songs ourselves. This meant we had a lot of freedom but it was also a little more challenging. We weren’t using songs from just one album, or chapters from a book. Given our research question, we thought it made more sense to include the songs of multiple jazz and blues singers. We ultimately chose songs based on their popularity at the time and if they were in the public domain. Our corpus is also unique because a lot of these songs have barely been preserved throughout history. Many do not have any sheet music or lyrics published on the internet—meaning we created XML by listening to them. You may see the word “indecipherable,” while reading through the songs—because the recordings are so old, sometimes the singer’s voice would be muffled and we were unable to make out the words.