Presentation for the British Library Doctoral Open Day for Music on 13 February 2017

1. Digital
Musicology
Amelie Roper
Curator, Digital Music
amelie.roper@bl.uk
@amelieroper

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What is digital musicology?

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What is needed for digital research?
• A ‘corpus’ (pl. ‘corpora’) or collection of data:
– Text-based (newspapers, journals, books)
– Music-notation based (printed and
manuscript music)
– Audio-based (sound and video)
• A means of searching, browsing or analysing
the data
• A way of collecting, interpreting and
displaying the results

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Some examples …
• Developing computer
programmes that can read
music manuscripts and
generate instant
transcriptions
• Writing algorithms to
analyse music
• But needn’t be high-tech!

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Access - simple
British Library Digitised Manuscripts
www.bl.uk/manuscripts

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Access - enhanced
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Stimmbuch-Viewer
http://stimmbuecher.digitale-sammlungen.de

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Access - comparing and contrasting
Biblissima Project
http://www.biblissima-condorcet.fr/

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Access - comparing and contrasting
Chopin Online
http://www.chopinonline.ac.uk

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Text mining
British Newspaper Archive
http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

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Music mining
RISM Incipit search
https://opac.rism.info

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Music mining
Peachnote Ngram Viewer
http://www.peachnote.com

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Data visualisation
Google Books Ngram Viewer
https://books.google.com/ngrams

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Working with datasets
British Library Music Cataloguing Data
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html

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More British Library datasets
British Library Music Cataloguing Data
https://data.bl.uk

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When working with datasets, bear in mind …
• Source of the data, its reliability, coverage,
completeness
• Results are only as good as the original
data
• Much data generated by OCR is imperfect
• Ownership and rights issues:
– What am I allowed to do with the data?
– How should I credit the data
owner/creator?

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Big Data History of Music
Places of publication and publishers, 1500-1800
Visualised with Google Fusion: https://support.google.com/fusiontables

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Creating your own dataset
Music pamphlets printed in Augsburg, 1500 to 1600
Data added to USTC: http://www.ustc.ac.uk

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Cleaning up data
Open Refine
http://www.openrefine.org

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Crowdsourcing
Tudor Partbooks Project
http://www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk

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Applying digital musicology techniques to
your research enables you to …
• Explore a bigger body of material
• See trends, patterns and relationships
• Gain a broad overview of a topic
• Test an idea or hypothesis on a large dataset

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And in conclusion …
Digital musicology
does not replace the
close study of texts,
scores and
recordings, but it
can complement it!

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@amelieroper
amelie.roper@bl.uk
Thank you!