Join the Libraries and the Music department for a talk during Open Access Week!

The decision to make any data of cultural significance open to the world is crucial, but there are immense barriers to disseminating data in a form that is valuable for pedagogy, research, and broader public benefit. Openness, then, might be treated as a continuum, since data can be technically available for use, but presented in a form that is so obtuse and disconnected from related datasets that it is difficult to use effectively. Drawing on data related to the work of two prolific folklorists—the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961) and the American Alan Lomax (1915–2002)—we explore some of these barriers and approaches for dealing with them. Topics covered include techniques for modeling data, from standard vocabularies through to bespoke metadata descriptions;  data quality and consistency; data storage; dealing with multi-modal datasets that combine text, music and images; navigating ethical and cultural sensitivities of data; and, effectively linking or aligning data that spans multiple institutions and employs varied metadata standards. Following the presentation and discussion of these case studies, attendees will be invited to discuss their own datasets, or datasets they have worked with, and potential challenges to making them more open.

Bio:

From 2011 to 2013, Dr Daniel Russo-Batterham worked as a researcher at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France, while completing a Master of Music. In April 2018, he graduated from his PhD at the University of Melbourne where he used computational methods to examine seventeenth-century lute songs, with a particular focus on the relationship between text and music. Since graduating, Daniel has worked on Digital Humanities projects across Australia and abroad. He has a background in python, data wrangling, relational database design, web scraping, quantitative methods, natural language processing, and a broad range of approaches to visualisation. He is currently working in the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform, a transdisciplinary workforce that collaborates with researchers to enhance data-intensive research.