Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces

Leonardo Music Journal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press): Arts & Humanities Titles etc, In press. Publication date: December 2020The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, I generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and derive functional principles of compositional design 15 by the direct analysis of the network topology. This approach provides a novel framework for the analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures, and suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities. Finally, the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer by quantifying emergent behaviors with 20 well-established statistical mechanics techniques. Interpreting the latter as probabilistic randomness in the network, I develop novel compositional design frameworks that are central to my own artistic research. One Sentence Summary: Network theory is an innovative tool for the classification of generalized musical spaces and provides a framework for the discovery or generation of functional 25 principles of compositional design

The hunt for submarines in classical art: mappings between scientific invention and artistic interpretation

This is a report to the AHRC's ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme. This report stems from a project which aimed to produce a series of mappings between advanced imaging information and communications technologies (ICT) and needs within visual arts research. A secondary aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of a structured approach to establishing such mappings. The project was carried out over 2006, from January to December, by the visual arts centre of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS Visual Arts).1 It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as one of the Strategy Projects run under the aegis of its ICT in Arts and Humanities Research programme. The programme, which runs from October 2003 until September 2008, aims ‘to develop, promote and monitor the AHRC’s ICT strategy, and to build capacity nation-wide in the use of ICT for arts and humanities research’.2 As part of this, the Strategy Projects were intended to contribute to the programme in two ways: knowledge-gathering projects would inform the programme’s Fundamental Strategic Review of ICT, conducted for the AHRC in the second half of 2006, focusing ‘on critical strategic issues such as e-science and peer-review of digital resources’. Resource-development projects would ‘build tools and resources of broad relevance across the range of the AHRC’s academic subject disciplines’.3 This project fell into the knowledge-gathering strand. The project ran under the leadership of Dr Mike Pringle, Director, AHDS Visual Arts, and the day-to-day management of Polly Christie, Projects Manager, AHDS Visual Arts. The research was carried out by Dr Rupert Shepherd

Visualising complex networks within humanities data for discovery and analysis

This paper describes the preliminary work leading to a project to build a web services visualisation tool that addresses the multi‐dimensional metadata used to describe cultural datasets, especially those created by researchers to meet specific research ends. The project will utilise the Knalij service developed by Steven Melnikoff (Information Physics, The University of Melbourne) together with datasets curated using the eScholarship Research Centre’s Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) system. In the first instance it is proposed that the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and the Australian Women’s Register datasets be used to operationalise the tool. Using offline visualisation tools, the study of both embedded and implied complex network structures within standards‐based Humanities datasets has revealed significant potential for analysis, navigation, discovery, and the development of new research methods. In October 2011 Knalij was awarded the USA challenge.gov prize for the most innovative uses of National Library of Medicine data. Knalij offers an interactive web service that can visualise the whole of PubMed in real time. This is a landmark achievement that opens up web services, real‐time visualisation capability for complex Humanities datasets with both synchronic and diachronic variables. As noted in the Knalij press release in October: ‘We visualized the entirety of cancer research since 1800 and displayed the progression through the decades. Our maps are searchable, interactive, and ready for researchers to discover trends, patterns, and connections. This is the first time that anyone has visually displayed the entire scope of cancer research in one searchable application. We are very excited to present this to the world'. The paper will focus on Australian Humanities research‐driven datasets and explore a range of uses from project management and documentation to the revelation of novel insights and understandings.Australian Academy of the Humanities; the ANU College of Arts and Social Science

The structural role of the core literature in history

The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally

Data fluidity in DARIAH -- pushing the agenda forward

This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspect of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars and finally a specific view on certification mechanisms for data

The Scientific Competitiveness of Nations

We use citation data of scientific articles produced by individual nations in different scientific domains to determine the structure and efficiency of national research systems. We characterize the scientific fitness of each nation (that is, the competitiveness of its research system) and the complexity of each scientific domain by means of a non-linear iterative algorithm able to assess quantitatively the advantage of scientific diversification. We find that technological leading nations, beyond having the largest production of scientific papers and the largest number of citations, do not specialize in a few scientific domains. Rather, they diversify as much as possible their research system. On the other side, less developed nations are competitive only in scientific domains where also many other nations are present. Diversification thus represents the key element that correlates with scientific and technological competitiveness. A remarkable implication of this structure of the scientific competition is that the scientific domains playing the role of "markers" of national scientific competitiveness are those not necessarily of high technological requirements, but rather addressing the most "sophisticated" needs of the society

Enroller: an experiment in aggregating resources

This chapter describes a collaborative project between e-scientists and humanists working to create an online repository of linguistic data sets and tools. Corpora, dictionaries, and a thesaurus are brought together to enable a new method of research. It combines our most advanced knowledge in both computing and linguistic research techniques

Infrastructures for digital research: new opportunities and challenges

No abstract available

Can a teaching university be an entrepreneurial university? Civic entrepreneurship and the formation of a cultural cluster in Ashland, Oregon

There has been debate over whether a teaching university can be an entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998). In a traditional conception of academic entrepreneurship focused on achieving commercial profit, a research base may be a pre-requisite to creating spin-offs. However, if we expand entrepreneurship into a broader conception to map its different forms such as commercial, social, cultural and civic entrepreneurship, it is clear that the answer is positive. In this study, we focus on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), which has transformed a small town based on resource extraction, a market center and a rail-hub into a theatre arts and cultural cluster. The convergence of entrepreneurship, triple helix model, cluster and regional innovation theories, exemplified by the Ashland case, has provided a model as instructive as Silicon Valley, to seekers of a general theory and practice of regional innovation and entrepreneurship. The role of Southern Oregon University (SOU) in the inception of a cultural cluster gives rise to a model for education-focused universities to play a significant role in local economic development through civic entrepreneurship