Presented at SIMSSA workshop XVII: Infrastructure for music discovery, McGill University, December 1, 2018.

1. Faculté des arts et des sciences
École de bibliothécnomie et des sciences de l'information
Social barriers to digital scholarship
for arts and humanities researchers
Audrey Laplante
Associate professor, Université de Montréal
SIMSSA workshop XVII: Infrastructure for music discovery
2018/12/01

2. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 2
How do we develop a music
research infrastructure that will
attract researchers who do not
use computational methods?
Research problem

3. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 3
What are the barriers that prevent some
music scholars from using computational
approaches for music analysis?
Research question

4. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 4
Adapted from Wilson (1996)
Information source characteristics
Technology/tool characteristics
Personal characteristics
e.g., educational level/training
Economic barriers
Situational/environmental barriers
Social barriers
Intervening variables

5. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 5
Potential barriers:
Source characteristics
Digitized? Searchable?
Dispersed in different catalogues?
Personal characteristics
Knowledge of information sources
Information literacy level
Economic barriers
Value of time and/or cost for hiring RAs
Travel costs
Situational barriers
Competent RAs available?
Social barriers…
Example task: corpus creation

6. Sociology of science
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 6

7. Mertonian norms of
‘modern science’
Communism
Universalism
Disinterestedness
Organized skepticism
(Merton, 1942)
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 7

8. Specificity of the
scientific field
“The ‘pure’ universe of even
the ‘purest’ science is a
social field like any other,
with its distribution of power
and its monopolies, its
struggles and strategies,
interests and profits, but it is
a field in which all these
invariants take on specific
forms.” (Bourdieu 1975)
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 8

9. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 9
“As a system of objective relations between
positions already won (in previous
struggles), the scientific field is the locus of a
competitive struggle, in which the specific
issue at stake is the monopoly of scientific
authority, defined inseparably as technical
capacity and social power”
(Bourdieu 1975)

10. In arts and humanities
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 10

11. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 11
Promotion, tenure, reward, funding, and
publication (Borgman 2007, Weller 2011, Zorich 2012)
Fear that the work will not be valued/recognized
No evaluation criteria or measures for new
research outputs (e.g., software, datasets)
Break with traditions
Impact on scholars’ professional identity (Liu 2013,
Weller 2011)
Threatening for peers (Borgman 2007, Zorich 2012)
Skepticism about these new methods (Zorich 2012)
Social barriers to DH research

12. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 12
Real research requires “slogging through materials.’
Using tools to make this process easier is ‘cheating,
laziness and not pure scholarship’ (Zorich 2012)
“A novelty that infringes on the contemplation and
reflection necessary to [the] discipline” (Zorich 2012)
”If it isn’t valued, goes the argument, then it isn’t
recognized when it comes to getting promotion”
(Weller 2011)
Hence the tendency to “play the promotion game”
(Competitor-)peer reviewing

13. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 13
to...
the great diminishers: they will reduce anything in
digital humanities (it's just a tool; it's just a repository;
it's just pedagogy). They have rarely, if ever, built
software, parsed code, created a database, or
designed a user interface. They are uni-medium
scholars (most likely of print) who have been lulled
into centuries of somnolence.
all those who would falsely equate the tools of the
present with a turn away from history in the name
of presentism, voguishness, or vocationalism”
The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (2008)

14. In musicology
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 14

15. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 15
Erickson (1968)
“In spite of the ever-increasing use and
acceptance of modern data processing
equipment for humanistic research, there would
appear to be … a widening gulf between scholars
who pursue the traditional methods of historical
musicology and those who have adopted the
computer as their chief research tool.”
Social barriers to digital musicology

16. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 16
Marsden (2009)
“…little has changed, it would appear. We
can now strike out the word ‘widening’, but
there is little evidence that the gulf
between ‘traditional’ analysts and those
who use the computer ‘as their chief
research tool’ is narrowing.”
Social barriers to digital musicology

17. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 17
Subject: ("computer applications" OR "computer-
aided") AND analysis in RILM 1967-
178
157 161
66
47
296
314
196
68
53
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
2009-2018 1999-2008 1989-1999 1979-1988 1969-1978
Journals Journals + Conference papers

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Where are these papers published?
Proceedings of ISMIR 111
Journal of New Music Research 86
Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 76
Computer Music Journal 47
Computing in Musicology 41
Computers and the Humanities 24
Mathematics and Computation in Music 21
Systematic Musicology/Musicologie systématique 17
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15
Computers in Music Research 13
Journal of Mathematics and Music 12
…
Journal of Music Theory 7

19. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 19
Researchers need to immerse themselves in the music to
understand it (Panteli et al. 2018)
Social context in which the music is actually heard is
disregarded (Panteli et al. 2018)
Skepticism about the ’rubustness’ of the methods (Panteli et
al. 2018)
Cultural bias embedded in the tools (Panteli et al. 2018)
Fear of superficiality/shallowness (Inskip & Wiering 2015)
Fear of the field losing its authority (Inskip & Wiering 2015)
Use of unbalanced corpora (availability) (Inskip & Wiering
2015, Panteli et al. 2018)
Overconfidence, laziness (Inskip & Wiering 2015)
Common criticisms

20. How can we overcome
these barriers?
SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 20

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Give visibility of digital musicology research
Provide educational resources
Train librarians and/or professionals in DH
centres
Provide a ‘novice’ interface:
Easy-to-use analysis tools
Attractive visualization tools
Potential solutions

22. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 22
Interviews with musicologists
Objectives
Learn about their scholarly primitives
Understand the (social) barriers and facilitators to
the adoption of computational methods
Collaborator: Jean-Sébastien Sauvé
What’s next?

23. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 23
Borgman, C. L. (2007). Scholarship in the digital age: information,
infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1975). La spécificité du champ scientifique et les conditions
sociales du progrès de la raison. Sociologie et sociétés, 7(1), 91-118.
doi:10.7202/001089ar
Erickson, R. (1968). Music analysis and the computer. Journal of Music
Theory, 12(2), 240-263. doi:10.2307/843312
Inskip, C., & Wiering, F. (2015). In their own words: using text analysis to
identify musicologists’ attitudes towards technology. In 16th
International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference,
Malaga, ISMIR (pp. 455-461): International Society for Music
Information Retrieval.
Liu, A. (2013). The meaning of the digital humanities. PMLA, 128(2), 409-
423. doi:10.1632/pmla.2013.128.2.409
Marsden, A. (2016). ‘What was the question?’: Music analysis and the
computer. In T. Crawford & L. Gibson (Eds.), Modern Methods for
Musicology (pp. 157-168): Routledge.
References

24. SIMSSA workshop XVIIA. Laplante 24
Merton, R. K. (1942). The normative structure of science.
Reprinted in R. K. Merton & N. W. Storer (Eds.), The sociology of
science: theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Panteli, M., Benetos, E., & Dixon, S. (2018). A review of manual
and computational approaches for the study of world music
corpora. Journal of New Music Research, 1-14.
doi:10.1080/09298215.2017.1418896
Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2009). The Digital Humanities Manifesto
2.0.
Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: how technology is changing
academic practice. London: Bloomsbury.
Wilson, T. D., & Walsh, C. (1996). Information behaviour: an inter-
disciplinary perspective.
Zorich, D. M. (2012). Transitioning to a digital world: art history, its
research centers, and digital scholarship.
References

25. Faculté des arts et des sciences
École de bibliothécnomie et des sciences de l'information
Thank you!
audrey.laplante@umontreal.ca