Spring 2018 Conferences, Part II

In February 2018 I participated in the “Power of Musical Networks” Seminar at the Orpheus Instituut in Ghent, Belgium. Sadly, my teaching schedule and modest travel budget kept me from making the trip, but the seminar organizers were kind enough to let me present remotely like I did for the Newcastle conference. 
 
I was scheduled to present at 9:30 in the morning Belgium time, which was 3:30 am where I live in Bloomington, Indiana. Presenting remotely always feels a bit strange, but it was especially weird to get up in the middle of the night, put on conference attire, talk to a bunch of strangers through my laptop, and then go back to bed. My 10-month old still wasn’t consistently sleeping through the night so, luckily, I was already conditioned for this. Still, the next morning I had an odd feeling that I had dreamt the whole thing. 
 
The seminar was worth the grogginess, of course. One of the cooler things about getting into DH is learning about the different music and interdisciplinary institutes that foster new approaches in research with workshops and resources. The Orpheus Instituut definitely does that.
 
For this presentation I created a couple of mockups in Cytoscape of unimodal and bimodal networks. In my dissertation network graph, the original archival text appears in the graph as a node attribute. This worked well for the bimodal network since the documents indicated relationships between institutions and the individuals they employed. 
 
I’m working on demonstrating relationships between people in a unimodal network, which would make the original source text is instead an edge attribute, which presents its own set of practical challenges.
 
In this very very crude mockup I have Legrenzi and two other musicians with documented relationships with him: Giovanni Francesco Pattavino Carlo Pallavicino. Pattavino was included in Legrenzi’s will, and Legrenzi conducted the choir for Pallavicino’s funeral in 1688. These two musicians clearly affected Legrenzi’s career but, since they were not mentioned in the specific documents I analyzed for my dissertation, they are not in the graph. 

Unimodal graph mockup using Cytoscape
I’m having issues with creating side bar windows for edge attributes. This seems to be beyond the “out of the box” functionality of the Gephis export plugin.

​For the other mockup I created another bimodal network graph linking the musicians named in four different tourist guides published between 1663 and 1700, linking them with the institutions the associated with them in the guides. 

​And then added the data from my other research that links musicians to institutions not in this graph.

Layering information from these two kinds of sources contextualizes the more public-facing marketing materials within the larger scope of a musician’s career. It also links institutions that would otherwise seem insular. This is obviously a very small sample, but it demonstrates how documents can potentially create layers of connectivity between musicians during these cultural shifts. 
 
I got to workshop approaches to multilayer networks and mapping my data for the “Digital Matters in Medieval and Renaissance Studies” symposium at Duke University. This was specifically a DH symposium, so I got to learn more about research methodologies and resources. 
 
There were really engaging plenaries by Cheryl Ball from Wayne State and Vaughn Stewart from UNC Greensboro, and I got to hear more about the spectacular Visualizing Venice initiative. Plus, I got to be on a panel with Anne MacNeil, who talked about the cool things happening with IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive.  
 
For this presentation (IRL this time) I created a map in ArcGis, using the same georeferenced 1729 map of Venice that I used in my Carto map. Focusing on the same tourist guides as for the Newcastle conference, I assigned a different layer to each of the documents to see how the guides highlight different institutions in the city.
 
I also created layer a layer for events from the Venetian liturgical calendar, using information from the Protogiornale Veneto, which was a subsection of Coronelli’s Guida from 1700.

This layering approach is one of my primary concerns in building the public facing graph. I’ll be focusing on this as I prepare for upcoming presentations at the GHI meeting in D.C. and AMS in San Antonio. 

​Thanks for reading! More updates coming soon.