The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performances (InterMusE)

现场音乐活动在世界各地的社区生活中发挥着至关重要的作用，但它们的“活力”意味着它们在历史记录上几乎没有留下痕迹。即使录音以某种形式保存了下来，来源也可能是不完整的，令人困惑的不一致，而且经常分散在不同的档案和收藏中。InterMusE将记录现场音乐事件的各种来源类型的数字化形式汇集在一起，并将它们连接起来，使它们能够相互“交谈”，尽管它们的格式显然不兼容。使用机器学习、自然语言处理、光学字符识别（OCR）和其他形式的人工智能，数据将从音乐会节目（一些手工注释）、回忆录和信件、海报、门票、小册子和其他蜉蝣、录音、报纸广告和评论、行政记录、传记词典中的条目、口述历史采访和观众回忆中收集。随着新工具和技术的发展，结果数据的丰富性将提供前所未有的机会来分类、操纵、询问和可视化有关音乐事件的信息，允许新的模式、见解和变化轨迹随着时间的推移而出现。InterMusE的变革之处在于其深度协作的方法，该方法基于共同设计原则，并尝试民主的数字化方法，使研究能够在设备相对较差和资源不足的环境中由公众和公众成员共同开发。这不仅重视首都和大城市以外的现场表演，而且也证实了业余、地方和社区活动的重要性，这些活动是如此多的地区文化生活所依赖的。该项目汇集了来自数字人文学科、音乐学、表演史、计算机科学与人机交互、图书馆学、档案理论与实践、遗产和文化产业的学者团队，开发新的社区参与方法、工具和技术，使各种利益相关者之间能够通过数字手段进行深度合作，包括公民研究人员、专业和业余音乐家、粉丝、爱好者、现场音乐活动的新人。该项目建立在两个主要文化机构和两个具有强大公民使命的研究型高等教育机构之间的跨大西洋合作基础上——克兰纳特表演艺术中心（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）和博思威克档案研究所（约克大学）。合作伙伴还包括三个由业余爱好者领导的音乐会协会，它们都起源于1918年由评论家和作曲家亚瑟·伊格尔菲尔德·赫尔（Arthur Eaglefield Hull）建立的“英国音乐协会”。赫尔帮助在英国各地的城镇建立了“分会”，在第一次世界大战和西班牙流感的双重灾难之后，恢复了英国和海外音乐家之间的音乐文化交流，并向新观众传授最新的音乐。现在，在2020年，其中三个分会刚刚庆祝或即将庆祝它们的百年纪念，并积累了大量的档案——哈德斯菲尔德音乐协会（协会所有）、约克英国音乐协会（在博思威克举行）和贝尔法斯特音乐协会（在亚麻布大厅图书馆，也是合作伙伴）。克兰纳特中心（Krannert Center）是一个主要的专业、多选区的场馆，拥有五个主要的表演空间，刚刚庆祝了它的半个世纪。InterMusE将音乐档案和组织聚集在一起，与他们自己的社区进行对话和合作，形成一个动态的数字档案，以新的方式处理数据，捕捉围绕关键事件的个人记忆，帮助文化机构了解自己的历史，并在他们对未来充满信心的时候反思自己的身份和传统。

Live musical events play a vital role in community life across the world, yet their very 'liveness' means they leave little trace on the historical record. Even where a recording has survived in some form, sources can be tantalisingly incomplete, confusingly inconsistent, and often scattered between different archives and collections. InterMusE brings together digitised forms of the various source-types that document a live musical event and links them, enabling them to 'speak' to each other despite their apparently incompatible formats. Using machine learning, natural language processing, optical character recognition (OCR), and other forms of artificial intelligence, data will be harvested from concert programmes (some hand-annotated), memoirs and correspondence, posters, tickets, brochures and other ephemera, recordings, newspaper advertisements and reviews, administrative records, entries in biographical dictionaries, and oral history interviews and audience reminiscences. With the development of new tools and techniques, the richness of the resulting data will afford unprecedented opportunities to sort, manipulate, interrogate, and visualise information about musical events, allowing new patterns, insights, and trajectories of change to emerge across time. What is transformative about InterMusE is its deeply collaborative methodology, based on principles of co-design and experimenting with democratic approaches to digitisation, enabling research to be developed by and with members of the public in environments that are relatively poorly equipped and under-resourced. Not only does this value live performances happening outside of capital cities and major conurbations, but it also confirms the importance of amateur, local, and community focused events on which so much regional cultural life depends. The project brings together a team of scholars from the digital humanities, musicology, performance history, computer science and human-computer interaction, librarianship, archival theory and practice, and the heritage and cultural industries to develop new community-engaged methods, tools, and techniques enabling deep collaboration by digital means among and between a wide variety of stakeholders, including citizen researchers, professional and amateur musicians, fans, aficionados, and newcomers to live musical events. The project is built on a transatlantic collaboration between two major cultural institutions and two research-led HEIs with a strong civic mission - the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and the Borthwick Institute for Archives (University of York). Partners also include three amateur-led concert societies with shared origins in the 'British Music Society' established in 1918 by critic and composer Arthur Eaglefield Hull - Hull helped to set up 'chapters' in towns and cities across the UK, to restore musical-cultural exchange between British and overseas musicians after the twin catastrophes of the Great War and Spanish Flu, and to educate new audiences in the latest music. Now, in 2020, three of those chapters have either just celebrated or are about to celebrate their centenary seasons and have amassed substantial archives - the Huddersfield Music Society (society owned), British Music Society of York (held at the Borthwick), and Belfast Music Society (at the Linen Hall Library, also a partner). The Krannert Center, a major professional, multi-constituency venue housing five major performance spaces, has just celebrated its half century. Bringing musical archives and organisations together, into dialogue and collaboration with their own communities, InterMusE will form a dynamic digital archive, enabling new ways of working with data and capturing individual memories around key events as a means of helping cultural institutions to understand their own histories and reflect on their identities and traditions as they plan with confidence for the future.