Music and Digital Humanities

Socially Responsible Digital Humanities during Precarious Times with Anna E. Kijas (Lilly Music Library, Tufts University)

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.

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

Programm

This lecture will explore what socially responsible digital humanities can look like in the face of environmental crisis, technological inequity, and evolving relationships between academia and the public. Organized around three interrelated modes of practice: Critique + Interrogate, Engage + Empower, and Imagine + Speculate, the lecture will provide examples from and examine how digital humanities as a field has become increasingly attuned to the material, social, and ecological conditions that underlie digital humanities work today.

Anna E. Kijas is Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship and Lilly Music Library at Tufts University. She co-founded Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War. 

Since 2022, Anna has served as the Administrative Chair of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) Board. She also served on the Executive Council for the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) (2019-2023), as founding co-chair of the MEI Digital Pedagogy Interest Group  (2020-2024), Editor for the Technical Reports & Monographs in Music Librarianship series (2021-2025), and founding coordinator of the Digital Humanities Interest Group for the Music Library Association (2013-2018).

Further infos can be found here.