Description
The course aims to introduce students to the rapidly evolving digital research methods of the humanities and, more specifically, to the opportunities these methods open up for musicological research. Familiarity with such methods is now taken for granted within the field's scholarly community.
The syllabus is organised around four strands. The first covers sources and documentation: the digital management of historical sources, metadata and music librarianship, digital repositories, digital preservation and copyright. The second turns to data: data structures (hierarchical structures, XML/TEI, databases), spreadsheets, information visualisation, quantitative research, sampling and survey research. The third introduces the web and programming: web technologies (HTML), web scraping and the Python programming language. The fourth fosters a critical approach to technology: the history and theory of the digital humanities, information verification and disinformation, and the use of artificial intelligence tools in research.
The course does not set out to turn musicologists into programmers. Rather, it equips them with the skills to formulate and pursue research questions by digital means, and to go on developing those skills independently once the course is over. Everything taught is put into practice, with Polymnia, the digital repository of the Laboratory for the Study of Hellenic Music, serving as the principal field of application.