Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research

Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research was an AHRC-funded project (AH/R004803/1) active between 2018 and 2019, led by Dr Kevin Page at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre. The project team consisted of digital musicologist David Lewis, also based at the Oxford e-Research Centre, and colleagues from our four collaborative partners.

The project took methods and analyses from digital musicology and demonstrated their utility beyond academia, with a focus on the flexibility and portability offered by digital approaches. This might be so that commercial companies, like publishers, can better index or display their music and music-related holdings; or to help cultural and charitable bodies holding rich collections of our musical heritage make these more accessible. The digital foundation for this reuse was laid in our precursor Transforming Musicology project, which adopted Linked Data descriptions during development of its data, methods and results.

Unlocking Musicology built four proof-of-concept demonstrators, with four different partners, as examples of our approach. This website documents each of these ‘microsites’ developed for: the New York Philharmonic Archives, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), the Lohengrin Digital Companion, and the Internet Archive Live Music Archive. We also held a Narratives through Data project showcase event in Oxford in July 2019.