Big Data for Musicology

Tillman Weyde — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 12:47:36 +0000

Digital music libraries and collections are growing quickly and are increasingly made available for research. We feel that the use of large data collections need will enable a better understanding of music performance and music in general, which will benefit areas such as music search and recommendation, music archiving and indexing, music production and education. However, to achieve these goals it is necessary to develop new musicological research methods and in addition to create and adapt the necessary technological infrastructure, to find way of working with legal limitations and to collect large scale data. Most of the necessary basic technologies exist, but they need to be brought together and applied to musicology.

We would like to talk about challenges from a digital humanities perspective and discuss methods and solutions that can enrich music research and make good use of existing and new data collections.

In that context we would like to present for discussion our ongoing work in our AHRC projects with the British Library (Digital Music Lab with data visualisations and ASyMMus) and the Spot the Odd Song Out game.

Enriching digitised archival content

George Weyman — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 16:19:30 +0000

Over the past year I have been project managing the content workstream of the British Library’s flagship digitisation programme with the Qatar Foundation, now launched and live on a bilingual free-to-use portal at www.qdl.qa.

This service offers a unique resource on the history of the Gulf region, drawing on primary collections at the British Library including the India Office Records, visual arts, digitised sound collections and the maps collections. You can learn more at www.qdl.qa/en/about.

My interest in this session is to riff with some digital tools proposed by the group for enriching the content without any further development to the portal. For example, that might mean:

Developing learning resources with a tool like Creativist.com
Drawing on the published contextual articles (see www.qdl.qa/en/articles-from-our-experts) to produce a Prezi.com
Creating archives of transcriptions and translations of source material (www.qdl.qa/en/search/site/?f%5B0%5D=document_source%3Aarchive_source)
Creating new collections of key content using a service like Diigo, Pinterest, Evernote or Delicious
Mapping key pages on a digital maps service
Extracting data from tables and charts to produce visualisations of issues like the history of slavery or trade
Constructing bi-lingual dialogues between Arabic and English speakers on key topics on Twitter or elsewhere, using multi-lingual translation services , such as Transfluent.com or www.flitto.com/

Or many other ideas besides. I do hope you’ll join and contribute. Here’s a video to help you decide:

Visualizations – THATCamp British Library Labs

Big Data for Musicology

Enriching digitised archival content