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

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.