Online networks and the production of value in electronic music

文化价值是其中一个领域，（正如俗话所说）感知也是现实。因此，社会学家认为，文化价值的生产实际上是一种信仰形式的生产。虽然关于文化如何形成的流行说法往往集中在杰出的个人创造者身上，但研究一再强调，他们的作品通常来自创造性的环境，在这种环境中，价值（或对价值的信仰）开始存在。这可以说解释了为什么文化生产者--音乐家、艺术家等--是文化产品最忠实的受众之一，也解释了为什么他们中的许多人主要为了其他生产者的欣赏而创作作品。这个项目突出了业余、专业和半专业文化生产之间的关系，通常认为这已经被Web 2.0技术所改变，它可能使每个互联网用户都成为数字内容的创作者和出版者。这个项目将通过关注一种特定的艺术形式--音乐，为我们理解文化及其价值在数字时代是如何产生的做出深刻的贡献。我们将从SoundCloud网站收集证据，许多音乐家使用该网站评论彼此的作品。我们将专注于与该网站有特殊关系的特定类型，即电子音乐。我们将把所有被创作者识别为电子音乐的同义词或公认类型的音频文件识别为“电子音乐”（仅举几个例子：dubstep，智能舞曲，电子音乐，algorave，chiptune，电子流行音乐，现场编码）。虽然SoundCloud的许多注册用户并不制作音频内容，但该网站最初的核心用户是音乐家，特别是电子音乐家，他们使用该网站评论彼此的作品。该项目将研究该网站数百万用户之间的关系，建立一系列社交网络图，以表示他们对其他用户上传的音频文件的评价。社会网络分析提供了数学方法来分析同行的尊重和反映的直觉，一个高度重视的创作者的意见可能会有特殊的影响：例如，在一个社会网络图表示积极的评价，更高的尊重生产者将占据更多的中心位置，与最中心的位置被那些谁是其他高度尊重的生产者尊重。为了加强这种分析，我们不仅要研究网站上“喜欢”和“关注”所暗示的评价，还要使用计算语言学分析来研究评论中使用的语言种类，并确定给定的评论可能是积极的还是消极的。此外，我们将在真实的世界中观察和采访音乐家，了解他们如何在网上和网下的相互关系中找到价值。调查结果将通过一系列场所进行传播，包括公共访问活动，其中包括进行相关研究的学者的讲座和邀请被研究的音乐家表演。我们还将撰写一份公开报告，向公众解释我们的发现（包括新兴音乐人，他们可能希望了解SoundCloud等网站在建立职业生涯中可以发挥的作用），我们将向我们创建的所有应用程序发布源代码并提供完整的说明，使其他研究人员（包括大学系统内外）调整这些应用程序以研究来自其他来源的数据。我们的网站将包括一个提供最新进展情况的博客，并将通过专业制作的视听播客和新闻稿向专业媒体进一步传播知识。

Cultural value is one of the areas in which (as the saying goes) perceptions are also realities. Thus, sociologists have argued that the production of cultural value is actually the production of a form of belief. Although popular accounts of how culture gets made tend to focus on brilliant individual creators, research has highlighted over and over again that their work typically emerges from a creative milieu, in which value (or belief in value) comes into existence. This arguably explains why cultural producers - musicians, artists, etc - are among the most committed audiences for cultural products, and why so many of them create work primarily for appreciation by other producers. This highlights the relationship between amateur, professional, and semi-professional cultural production, which is commonly assumed to have been transformed by Web 2.0 technologies that potentially making every internet user into a creator and publisher of digital content.This project will make an incisive contribution to our understanding of how culture and its value is produced in the digital age by focusing on a specific art form: music. We will gather evidence from the SoundCloud website, which many musicians use for commenting on one another's work. And we will focus on a specific genre that has a special relationship with that website, i.e. electronic music. We will identify as 'electronic music' all audio files that are identified by their creators with synonyms of or recognised genres of electronic music (to take just a few examples: dubstep, intelligent dance music, electronica, algorave, chiptune, electronic pop, live coding). Although many registered users of SoundCloud do not produce audio content, the website's original core users consisted of musicians - especially electronic musicians - who use it for commenting on one another's work. This project will study relationships between millions of users of that website, building a series of social network graphs to represent their evaluations of audio files uploaded by other users. Social network analysis provides mathematical ways of analysing peer esteem and reflecting the intuition that the opinion of a highly-regarded creator may have special impact: for example, in a social network diagram representing positive evaluations, more highly esteemed producers will occupy more central positions, with the most central positions being occupied by those who are esteemed by other highly esteemed producers. In order to enhance this analysis, we will not only study evaluations implied by 'likes' and 'follows' on the website, but also use computational linguistic analysis to study the kinds of language used in comments and identify whether a given comment is likely to be positive or negative. Moreover, we will observe and interview musicians in the real world in order to understand how they locate value in their relationships with one another, both online and off.Findings will be disseminated through a range of venues, including a public access event featuring lectures from academics who have carried out related studies and invited performances by musicians who have been studied. We will also write a public report explaining our findings to a general audience (including emerging musicians who may wish to understand the role that websites such as SoundCloud can play in building a career), and we will release the source code to all the applications we create, with full instructions that will enable other researchers (both inside and outside the university system) to adapt those applications to study data from other sources. Our website will include a blog providing progress updates, and knowledge will be further disseminated through professionally-produced audiovisual podcasts and press releases to specialist media.