Music and Digital Humanities

Tool or Toy? The tension between infrastructure and innovation with Andrew Hankinson (RISM Digital)

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw’s Department for Music Acoustics - Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw’s Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

This lecture will explore the tension in Digital Humanities between building resources that are long-lasting and widely used, and the need (and desire) to be constantly pushing the envelope with new research programmes, new technology, and new methodologies. With the former, the risk is stagnation as social inertia forces you to maintain something that carries the weight of entire disciplines; with the latter, the risk is half-baked, undocumented, and complex tools that promise new insights but are unusable by all but a select few and left unmaintained as you move on to new things.

In this talk, Andrew Hankinson will explore what it means to be intentional about what you build, from the perspective of several real-world case studies: running large websites such as the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) and RISM Online, and maintaining software, such as Diva.js and libmei, that was never imagined would be in use decades later. He will discuss what one needs to know before one starts, and what one can do when a project needs to end.

Andrew Hankinson is a software developer with the RISM Digital Center in Bern, Switzerland. He has been the technical lead on a number of widely used systems and services, including Digital Bodleian at the University of Oxford, the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), and, most recently, RISM Online. He is also part of several large research projects, including LinkedMusic, the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA), and Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT).

Further infos can be found here.

Zeit & Ort
23. Mär. 2026, 17:00
Bankettsaal
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1
1030 Wien

weitere Termine
02. Mär. 2026, 17:00
09. Mär. 2026, 17:00
16. Mär. 2026, 17:00
23. Mär. 2026, 17:00
13. Apr. 2026, 17:00
27. Apr. 2026, 17:00
04. Mai. 2026, 17:00
11. Mai. 2026, 17:00
18. Mai. 2026, 17:00
01. Jun. 2026, 17:00
08. Jun. 2026, 17:00
22. Jun. 2026, 17:00
29. Jun. 2026, 17:00

Eintritt
frei

Kontakt
David M. Weigl
weigl [a] mdw[.]ac[.]at

Chanda VanderHart
vanderhart [a] mdw[.]ac[.]at

Veranstalter_in
Institut für musikalische Akustik - Wiener Klangstil (IWK)

Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Interpretationsforschung

Forschungsförderung