Projects
Projects
Accelerating embedded computational analysis of Web data about music in UK universities
Duration
This project begins in January 2023, and runs for 12 months.
Funding
This project is funded by an AHRC grant, which was awarded in 2022.
Lay summary
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. However, specialised digital skills are required to retrieve, process, and analyse this data, especially at the scales that are required to deal with the increasing volumes of information available to researchers online. Despite its importance, which has been recently recognised by music researchers working in a variety of disciplines – including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, digital media and communication studies, and sociology – there are limited opportunities for UK-based researchers to acquire the necessary skills that will allow them to unlock this valuable data for use in their own research.
The project will address this problem by piloting a new digital skills training programme for music researchers, which will train approximately 60 UK-based researchers at a variety of digital skill levels and representing various career stages in topics relevant to using Web data as a primary source. Six, one-day, online workshops will be held on topics that are directly relevant to the needs of music researchers who are interested in making use of Web data in their research, which will be elicited through a survey programme and focus groups at the partner institutions of Durham University and the University of Birmingham. Some of the topics covered include: an introduction to Web technology for music researchers; training in the use new, user-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the retrieval of Web data; and the advanced use of command- line interfaces to capture and analyse large amounts of Web data. The training offered will be of direct relevance to music researchers, as all workshop leaders themselves are music researchers, and they will be invited to illustrate how digital skills training has allowed them to answer exciting, transformative research questions.
To ensure the usefulness of the training sessions to a much broader audience than the first cohort of trainees covered in this pilot project, workshop leaders and project staff will prepare their training materials according to an innovative and well-regarded methodology for open, reusable, and sustainable software skills training, known as The Carpentries. To ensure this, the project will consult with trainers from the Sustainable Software Institute, who will provide workshop leaders and project staff with the training needed to become certified Carpentries instructors and to successfully design and deliver collaborative digital skills training lessons. Toward the end of the project, the results of the survey programme and focus groups will be analysed, and the strengths and the weaknesses of the pilot will be critically analysed in a co-authored, peer-reviewed journal article. Additionally, the training materials used in the workshops will be published online and made freely available to all participants and other music researchers, so that they in turn may train others in digital skills that unlock Web data as a primary source. The project is led by a multidisciplinary team of investigators, spanning computer science and musicology, who all have used digital skills to advance their research goals.
Engaging local publics in the history of the CD at 40
Duration
This project begins in May 2022, and runs for 12 months.
Funding
This project is funded by a Durham University Research Impact Fund grant, which was awarded in 2022.
Lay summary
The 40th anniversary of the audio compact disc (CD) (late 1982-1983), provides an opportunity to reflect on the history of this once-new digital media technology by engaging with its users: radio broadcasters, early adopters, and workers who fabricated these discs in the UK. The project will identify these three cohorts locally with newspaper and social media ads and then offer a series of community engagement visits, which will be recorded. Recordings will be collaboratively edited and published in a new documentary audio CD and online. The purpose is to improve public understanding of the cultural, economic, and artistic effects of digitalisation on the music industry circa 1982 in the UK. Distinctive features of the project include its emphasis on hands-on engagement with the format’s material history, the reflexive use of the CD medium as deliverable, and its potential for sustained impact by scaffolding future engaged research on digital media history at Durham.
Conversations on machine learning and conceptual change (with Alexander Campolo)
Duration
This project will take place in Epiphany Term 2022/23
Funding
This project is funded by an IAS Development Grant
Lay summary
The past decade has seen a huge growth in the development of machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and related data sciences, cutting across the natural and social sciences. Academics, industry, and research councils recognise that these techniques demand cross-disciplinary collaboration. Often, however, familiar patterns emerge: computer scientists and engineers working on technical issues with domain experts providing disciplinary ideas and context. Likewise, the urgent need for ethical engagement with ML technologies, often results in importing pre-existing ethical principles or social critiques from the outside to address novel problems, an issue addressed by Amoore (2020), Katz (2020) and – in other terms – by Agre (1997).
But there is a more fundamental way in which contemporary ML technologies demand interdisciplinary thinking: the ways that they ask us to reimagine basic concepts in the social and natural sciences. What new forms of prediction and inference do they make possible, and how might these affect our ability to imagine social political futures? What attributes of people, things, and places can be recognized and classified?
These questions quickly open onto a core fundamental issue that is the topic of this development project: how precisely is knowledge created from data by machine learning systems, and what claims to groundedness does such knowledge make? Prior attempts to address this questions have foundered on mutual disciplinary misrecognition between STEM and AHSS researchers.
Our project will pose these deeper questions in a series of five, hour-long “fireside chats” between two researchers (one STEM, one AHSS) at IAS. Each event is directly preceded by a lunch meal in which all four get to know each other informally, along with a small number of invited PGRs/staff researchers. The subsequent talks themselves will be open to the wider University and Durham community. We plan to hold five of these events on a biweekly basis during Epiphany Term 2022/2023.