Accelerating Digital Skills for Music Researchers

A brief overview of the project will be given by Eamonn Bell (PI; Computer Science, Durham University), highlighting activities which have already been carried out as part of the project and future events. The presentation will also touch on the kinds of new research questions that working with web data can start to answer, going beyond late twentieth- and twenty-first-century music traditions.

Staff and postgraduates from the Music Department are then invited to take part in a focus group session to discuss their views on digital skills and needs which would benefit music researchers who want to use web data in their music research. Two concurrent focus group sessions will be run: one for staff and one for postgraduates. During the focus group, music researchers will be invited to discuss the types of web data which they deem important for their research, the digital skills they think would help them work with web data, and what research questions they would consider addressing if they had access to any type of web data and had the digital skill set to use it in their research.  

Ethical approval to run the focus groups has been granted by the Computer Science Department Ethics Committee of Durham University in June 2023. 

Speaker biography

Dr Eamonn Bell (https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/eamonn-bell/) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. He completed his doctoral studies in music theory at Columbia University in 2019, followed by an Irish Research Council-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. He currently researches both the application of computational techniques to questions in music history and music theory as well as the twentieth-century history of the same.

Background

Web data is especially useful for the cultural study of music as the internet plays host to novel and complex cultural and social forms, like music streaming, ripping and sharing, and online co-production of music. Working with APIs and other data sources, scraping websites, dealing with the ethical issues relating to Internet research about music, and processing large bodies of online texts about music are all specialised skills. Recent applications of these techniques have charted the social construction of twenty-first century music genres online (Born and Haworth 2017), explored the construction of the aesthetics and affects of ASMR on YouTube (Spencer 2020), analysed the reception of Top 40 pop music in 1M+ YouTube comments (Bell 2023), characterised shared understandings of timbre in UK EDM by looking at fan discourse online (Perevedentseva 2022, PhD thesis) and conducted ethnographic research on hip-hop producer economies on Twitch (Ng and Gamble 2022).