The following programme of Workshops and Lunchtime Spotlights was delivered as part of the “Accelerating embedded computational analysis of Web data about music in UK universities” project (AH/X007316/1):
Workshop 1: Processing Text-Based Corpora for Musical Discourse Analysis (15 August 2023)
Workshop 2: Ethical and Methodological Essentials for Music Researchers using Web Data (21 August 2023)
Workshop 3: Command-Line Basics and Web Data Fundamentals for Music Researchers (30 August 2023)
Workshop 4: A Gentle Introduction to R for Music Researchers (2 November 2023)
Lunchtime Spotlight 1: Working With Web Archives for Music Researchers (13 November 2023)
Lunchtime Spotlight 2: Collecting Social Media Data About Music (22 November 2023)
Workshops followed a practice-based approach where participants were encouraged to actively engage with the material and have a go at coding by following along with the instructor during the workshop.
The Lunchtime Spotlights were one-hour long information sessions with the aim of briefly introducing attendees to a specific topic related to web data about music.
All activities were free and were held online on Zoom. Activities were open to music researchers based in the UK.
More details of the activities may be found below.
Workshop Leader: Dr Maria Perevedentseva
Date and Time: Tuesday 15th August 2023, 10:00-16:00 BST
Location: Online (Zoom)
This workshop will provide a conceptually grounded introduction to some of the computational tools for analysing large text-based datasets about music. We will work with browser-based tools including Voyant and TensorFlow’s Embedding Projector, and practice live coding in Python in order to explore various properties of the datasets, derive meaningful information about their contents and understand the quantitative and qualitative relations they reveal. Upon completion of the workshop, it is expected that participants will have a grasp of the foundational concepts of natural language processing and corpus linguistics that will enable them to design and implement larger projects of their own.
No prior programming experience is necessary, but participants are asked to install the free Jupyter Notebook software in advance of the workshop.
UPDATE: Registration for this workshop has now closed.
Workshop Leader: Dr Steven Gamble
Date and Time: Monday 21st August 2023, 10:00-16:00 BST
Location: Online (Zoom)
This workshop invites participants interested in researching Web data about music to consider and work through key ethical and methodological considerations. We will examine best practice principles and ethical guidelines developed in neighbouring fields in addition to specific case studies in existing research on music and the internet. The workshop will encourage participants to actively address issues of legality, privacy, fairness, inclusion, and social justice in designing research projects including Web data.
UPDATE: Registration for this workshop has now closed.
Workshop Leader: Dr Eamonn Bell
Date and Time: Wednesday 30th August 2023, 10:00-16:00 BST
Location: Online (Zoom)
This workshop will introduce the basics of interacting with command-line applications and will demonstrate a variety of command-line tools that are useful for the retrieval and storage of large amounts of data about music that circulates online, including an introduction to HTTP APIs. The workshop is targeted at participants who already feel comfortable using graphical tools (e.g., web browsers, Excel) to access and perform basic analyses of Web data about music online.
UPDATE: Registration for this workshop has now closed.
Workshop Leader: Dr Annaliese Micallef Grimaud
Date and Time: Thursday 2nd November 2023, 10:00-16:00 GMT
Location: Online (Zoom)
This hands-on workshop will serve as an introduction to working with data using the programming language R. We will cover some of the important steps involved in transforming downloaded data into workable data. We will also run some basic analyses and create visualisations of the data. The workshop aims to give participants a basic understanding of some best practices when writing code in R to encourage reproducibility in research, and also recognise certain pros and cons of using a programming language (like R) as against a graphical tool (like Excel) to work with data.
No prior programming experience is required, but participants are asked to download and install both R and RStudio in advance of the workshop.
UPDATE: Registration for this workshop has now closed.
Activity Leader: Dr Eamonn Bell
Date and Time: Monday 13th November 2023, 13:00-14:00 GMT
Location: Online (Zoom)
Archived websites host valuable primary sources for music research that remain largely untapped by researchers, owing to the skills required to access them effectively. This short session, targeted at music researchers at all career stages, will showcase a variety of approaches to accessing this data, ranging from the use of popular interfaces to non-profit web archives (including The Wayback Machine) to more complex methods for working with large amounts of archived web data.
UPDATE: Registration for this activity has now closed.
Activity Leader: Dr Eamonn Bell
Date and Time: Wednesday 22nd November 2023, 13:00-14:00 GMT
Location: Online (Zoom)
Social media platforms have come to pervade the experience of life online, and, as such, they reliably promote and capture a lively record of contemporary music-making as well as the collective circulation and consumption of diverse musical histories. This short session, targeted at music researchers at all career stages, explores practical techniques for collecting social media data from some popular platforms, with a view to later computational analysis. It will showcase both easy-to-use graphical tools and some more complex tools that can be used for the retrieval and storage of social media data.
UPDATE: Registration for this activity has now closed.
If you would like to learn more about the training being offered, please join us for a Q&A session on Zoom on Monday 31st July at 10am BST. Register here.
UPDATE: Please find the slides from this session for download.