The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research

J. Stephen Downie; Sayan Bhattacharyya; Francesca Giannetti; Eleanor Dickson Koehl; Peter Organisciak

doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00283-7

The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research

J. Stephen Downie, Sayan Bhattacharyya, Francesca Giannetti, Eleanor Dickson Koehl, Peter Organisciak

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is one of the largest digital libraries in the world, containing seventeen million volumes from the collections of major academic and research libraries. In this paper, we discuss the HTDL’s potential for musicology research by providing a bibliometric analysis of the collection as a whole, and of the music materials in particular. A series of case studies illustrates the kinds of musicological research that may be conducted using the HTDL. We highlight several opportunities for improvement and discuss promising future directions for new knowledge creation through the processing and analysis of large amounts of retrospective data. The HTDL presents significant new opportunities to the study of music that will continue to expand as data, metadata and collection enhancements are introduced.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	343-358
Number of pages	16
Journal	International Journal on Digital Libraries
Volume	21
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00283-7
State	Published - Dec 1 2020

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Library and Information Sciences

Keywords

Digital humanities
Digital libraries
Distant reading
Musicology

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00283-7

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title = "The HathiTrust Digital Library{\textquoteright}s potential for musicology research",

abstract = "The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is one of the largest digital libraries in the world, containing seventeen million volumes from the collections of major academic and research libraries. In this paper, we discuss the HTDL{\textquoteright}s potential for musicology research by providing a bibliometric analysis of the collection as a whole, and of the music materials in particular. A series of case studies illustrates the kinds of musicological research that may be conducted using the HTDL. We highlight several opportunities for improvement and discuss promising future directions for new knowledge creation through the processing and analysis of large amounts of retrospective data. The HTDL presents significant new opportunities to the study of music that will continue to expand as data, metadata and collection enhancements are introduced.",

keywords = "Digital humanities, Digital libraries, Distant reading, Musicology",

author = "Downie, {J. Stephen} and Sayan Bhattacharyya and Francesca Giannetti and Koehl, {Eleanor Dickson} and Peter Organisciak",

note = "Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Kirstin (Dougan) Johnson and Colleen Fallaw, who were co-authors of a preliminary version of this paper, which appeared in the Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology. We wish to thank Janina Sarol for her help in generating the data for this paper. Xiao Hu provided valuable suggestions and critique. Mike Furlough of the HathiTrust, as well as Tim Cole of the HathiTrust Research Center, helpfully answered our queries. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and generous commentary. This work was made possible with generous support from the HathiTrust Foundation. Funding Information: A recent initiative of interest for the music content of the HTDL is the Workset Creation Through Image Analysis of Document Pages (WCTIADP) project, one of the prototyping projects of Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA), a HathiTrust Research Center initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [, ]. Using the HTDL as dataset, the WCTIADP project aims to develop a software application that will use the visual characteristics of digitized printed pages to identify documents containing three kinds of visually distinctive materials—poetry, music, and illustrations—of interest to humanities researchers. This approach can help automatically identify those regions of a page that additionally contain musical notation even though the page as a whole does contain standard text elsewhere. This can potentially enable researchers to execute queries that will run exclusively against those regions within pages that only contain music. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.",

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doi = "https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00283-7",

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AU - Bhattacharyya, Sayan

AU - Giannetti, Francesca

AU - Koehl, Eleanor Dickson

AU - Organisciak, Peter

N1 - Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Kirstin (Dougan) Johnson and Colleen Fallaw, who were co-authors of a preliminary version of this paper, which appeared in the Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology. We wish to thank Janina Sarol for her help in generating the data for this paper. Xiao Hu provided valuable suggestions and critique. Mike Furlough of the HathiTrust, as well as Tim Cole of the HathiTrust Research Center, helpfully answered our queries. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and generous commentary. This work was made possible with generous support from the HathiTrust Foundation. Funding Information: A recent initiative of interest for the music content of the HTDL is the Workset Creation Through Image Analysis of Document Pages (WCTIADP) project, one of the prototyping projects of Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA), a HathiTrust Research Center initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [, ]. Using the HTDL as dataset, the WCTIADP project aims to develop a software application that will use the visual characteristics of digitized printed pages to identify documents containing three kinds of visually distinctive materials—poetry, music, and illustrations—of interest to humanities researchers. This approach can help automatically identify those regions of a page that additionally contain musical notation even though the page as a whole does contain standard text elsewhere. This can potentially enable researchers to execute queries that will run exclusively against those regions within pages that only contain music. Publisher Copyright: © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

PY - 2020/12/1

Y1 - 2020/12/1

N2 - The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is one of the largest digital libraries in the world, containing seventeen million volumes from the collections of major academic and research libraries. In this paper, we discuss the HTDL’s potential for musicology research by providing a bibliometric analysis of the collection as a whole, and of the music materials in particular. A series of case studies illustrates the kinds of musicological research that may be conducted using the HTDL. We highlight several opportunities for improvement and discuss promising future directions for new knowledge creation through the processing and analysis of large amounts of retrospective data. The HTDL presents significant new opportunities to the study of music that will continue to expand as data, metadata and collection enhancements are introduced.

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KW - Digital libraries

KW - Distant reading

KW - Musicology

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JO - International Journal on Digital Libraries

JF - International Journal on Digital Libraries

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ER -

The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research

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ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

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