Towards a Prosopography of Musicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland: Adventures in Machine Learning and Digital Humanities
Please note this event was rescheduled from Wednesday 27 September 2023 to Wednesday 4 October 2023.
Abstract
Towards a Prosopography of Musicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland: Adventures in Machine Learning and Digital Humanities
Due to the ravages of the reformation – quite probably magnified by the subsequent removal of the court to London and concomitant destruction of documents, both deliberate and accidental – there is remarkably little music which survives from pre-reformation Scotland. The two largely complete surviving manuscripts – W1 and the Carver Choirbook – take on an unusual significance, seemingly standing as isolated testimonies to polyphonic performance in the country. Magnified by historiographical lenses which tend to treat Scotland as something of a cultural and artistic wasteland, this has led to the mistaken belief that there was little or no quality music performance in Scotland in the period, and that these two sources are an unusual aberration, rather than the surviving tip of a much larger iceberg.
The Prosopography of pre-Reformation Scottish Music project was instigated, in part, to address this historical and historiographical issue. Whilst little may survive in the way of polyphony, and whilst large-scale institutional records such as we might expect at the Oxbridge colleges, for instance, may be thinner on the ground, there are still copious references to music and musicians from before the reformation scattered through smaller archival documents in Scotland. An approach based on digital prosopography is necessary to make sense of such a fragmented picture – but such methods can undoubtedly help the picture to come into clearer focus. Indeed, the picture they paint is of a vibrant musical landscape with monophony, polyphony, and everything in between being an integral part of both institutional worship, and the private economy of salvation. Our work to-date has begun to sketch some methodologies for dealing with this new approach, designing and building a new prosopographical database which can be populated manually, as well as new machine learning methods which are able to pull relevant information from antiquarian transcriptions and translations automatically. My talk will share some of this preliminary work with a view to potential future collaborations across the humanities.
Speaker Biography
Dr James Cook is ECA Director of Research Innovation and Senior Lecturer in Early Music. He works on Medieval and Renaissance music both in history and its subsequent revivals in popular media, especially television, history, and video game. He has published widely in both areas, as well as leading funded projects with a focus on digital approaches to archival work, and VR reconstruction of lost historical performance spaces.
Event Information
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Digital Scholarship Centre
Digital Scholarship Centre, 6th floor
Main Library
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh EH8 9LJ