Video / Audio  Digital Humanities

Digital humanities approaches, including Franco Moretti’s influential concept of “distant reading,” have transformed areas of textual scholarship in recent decades, but such ideas have had less of an impact on musicology. There were two reasons for this lack of uptake in music: first, a general dearth of tools for examining hundreds or thousands of musical scores. Second, there were few examples of such approaches’ success in answering difficult questions in music history, necessary to reward the investment of time and energy in the skills in programming to access these techniques. In this talk, Cuthbert, argues that both hurdles have finally been overcome by demonstrating approaches to “distant listening” to musical scores with the music21 toolkit, developed at M.I.T., and its application to finding previously unknown webs of influence, citation, quotation, perhaps even plagiarism, among a repertory of 3,000 musical scores drawn from European sources from 1300–1430, including the identification of over 30 fragmentary musical works previously considered too small or illegible for study.

Since the 1940s, invocations of "close reading" (however understood) have figured centrally in controversies over new methodological developments in literary studies: e.g., the New Criticism, structuralism, New Historicism, deconstruction, ideology critique, and, notably now, the Digital Humanities. The talk recalls some of those controversies and considers how the idea or ideal of "close reading" operates in current debates about-- and within-- the Digital Humanities.

The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated. This provocative and thoughtful book makes an important intervention in the debate about the role of history and the humanities in a digital age.