Music and Digital Humanities

Bridging Datasets: Linked Data for Digital Musicologists with Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Australian National University)

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities at mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw's Department for Music Acoustics — Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw's Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

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This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

As an information publication paradigm, Linked Data has a great deal to offer researchers in the areas of Digital Musicology and the Digital Humanities more broadly. In this talk, I will introduce the basics of the Linked Data methodology, including its potential and limitations, as applied in the context of broader interdisciplinary spaces that bridge the Humanities and Computer Science. My case study example, JazzCats, illustrates how musicological data in different formats from different sources can be successfully bridged, and queried for answers to questions that go far beyond what can be asked of a single dataset. The project aggregates three different kinds of information, namely a discography, performance metadata, and prosopographical information about musicians. These datasets come in three different formats; tabular data, in the form of a spreadsheet; relational data, as exported from a MySQL Lite database; and, graph data as RDF (.ttl).  Although the value of this aggregation, and in particular the benefit it has for researchers, is undisputed, the project itself has fallen victim to challenges of institutional change and policy regarding legacy projects. This talk will highlight how these challenges in academia are particularly disruptive to projects in the Digital Humanities, and have far-reaching consequences for Linked Data projects across disciplines and jurisdictions.

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is an Associate Professor, Information Interaction at the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her interdisciplinary research examines different methods for data linking and integration, and how digital technologies support and diversify research. She is the author of Linked Data for Digital Humanities (2023, Routledge), and has publications that cover a range of topics from the use, development, and critical evaluation of Linked Data to gamification and informal online environments in education. She has also created 3D digital models for the British Museum (cuneiform tablets), the National Museum of Australia (carved boab nuts), and UNESCO (Fels Cave in Vanuatu). Terhi is an Honorary Associate Professor at POLIS, the Centre for Social Policy and Research at the Australian National University; a member of the Territory Records Advisory Council, Policy and Cabinet Division, of the Chief Minister Australian Capital Territory Government; and a co-chair of the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group.

Further infos can be found here.