DLfM 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

In 2017 DLfM calls for paper submissions to two tracks: a ‘proceedings track’ for short and full papers which will be presented at the workshop and published in the workshop proceedings; and a ‘Transforming Musicology challenge’ track for presented papers and posters.

Workshop location

Shanghai is one of the most populous cities in the world, a major international gateway to China and an important academic centre, housing over thirty universities and colleges. As a location for a satellite workshop of ISMIR, it is especially convenient, being on the route many attendees will use to return home.

The Shanghai Conservatory of Music was one of the first in China to offer higher education in music and has an international reputation for the standard of its students and teaching staff. The Conservatory also houses a substantial library and a Museum of Oriental Musical Instruments.

Background

Many Digital Libraries have long offered facilities to provide multimedia content, including music. However there is now an ever more urgent need to specifically support the distinct multiple forms of music, the links between them, and the surrounding scholarly context, as required by the transformed and extended methods being applied to musicology and the wider Digital Humanities.

The Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) workshop presents a venue specifically for those working on, and with, Digital Library systems and content in the domain of music and musicology. This includes Music Digital Library systems, their application and use in musicology, technologies for enhanced access and organisation of musics in Digital Libraries, bibliographic and metadata for music, intersections with music Linked Data, and the challenges of working with the multiple representations of music across large-scale digital collections such as the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.

This, the fourth Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop, is a satellite event of the annual International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference being held in nearby Suzhou, and in particular encourages reports on the use of MIR methods and technologies within Music Digital Library systems when applied to the pursuit of musicological research.

Workshop objectives

DLfM will focus on the implications of music on Digital Libraries and Digital Libraries research when pushing the boundaries of contemporary musicology, including the application of techniques as reported in more technologically-oriented fora such as ISMIR and ICMC.

This will be the fourth edition of DLfM following very successful and well received workshops at Digital Libraries 2014, JCDL 2015, and ISMIR 2016, giving an opportunity for the community to present and discuss recent developments that address the challenges of effectively combining technology with musicology through Digital Library systems and their application.

The workshop objectives are:

  • to act as a forum for reporting, presenting, and evaluating this work and disseminating new approaches to advance the discipline;
  • to create a venue for critically and constructively evaluating and verifying the operation of Music Digital Libraries and the applications and findings that flow from them;
  • to consider the suitability of existing Music Digital Libraries, particularly in light of the transformative methods and applications emerging from musicology, large collections of both audio and music related data, ‘big data’ method, and MIR;
  • to set the agenda for work in the field to address these new challenges and opportunities.

Topics

Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Music Digital Libraries
  • Applied MIR techniques in Music Digital Libraries and musicological investigations using them
  • Techniques for locating and accessing music in Very Large Digital Libraries (e.g. HathiTrust, Internet Archive)
  • Music data representations, including manuscripts/scores and audio
  • Interfaces and access mechanisms for Music Digital Libraries
  • Digital Libraries in support of musicology and other scholarly study; novel requirements and methodologies therein
  • Digital Libraries for combination of resources in support of musicology (e.g. combining audio, scores, bibliographic, geographic, ethnomusicology, performance, etc.)
  • User information needs and behaviour for Music Digital Libraries
  • Identification/location of music (in all forms) in generic Digital Libraries
  • Mechanisms for combining multi-form music content within and between Digital Libraries and other digital resources
  • Information literacies for Music Digital Libraries
  • Metadata and metadata schemas for music
  • Application of Linked Data and Semantic Web techniques to Music Digital Libraries, and for their access and organisation
  • Optical Music Recognition
  • Ontologies and categorisation of musics and music artefacts

Submissions

Papers for either track will be peer reviewed by 2-3 members of the programme committee.

Please produce your paper using the ACM template and submit it to DLfM on EasyChair by 30 June 2017 (see Important dates).

All submitted papers must:

  • be written in English;
  • contain author names, affiliations and e-mail addresses;
  • be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template, using a Type 1 font no smaller than 9pt;
  • be in PDF format (please ensure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for A4 size.

It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format. Submissions that do not comply with the above requirements may be rejected without review.

Please note that at least one author from each accepted paper must attend the workshop to present their work.

Submissions: Proceedings track

We invite full papers (up to 8 pages) or short and position papers (up to 4 pages). In addition to the general submission requirements above, we will require that camera-ready copy be received before 15 September 2017 (see Important dates). At least one author from each accepted paper must be registered by that date.

Submissions: Transforming Musicology Challenge

What will the next generation of musicologists be studying? And how will they carry out their research? What part will digital technology play in the musicology of the future? And how will future musicologists be using digital libraries?

The Transforming Musicology Challenge solicits short position paper submissions to the Digital Libraries for Musicology Workshop of up to 2 pages (see Submissions). Transforming Musicology Challenge papers should describe, in detail, a musicological investigation or scenario that uses, or might use in the future, technologies relevant to DLfM (see the Topics section of the call). The ideal entry would speculate on the kind work that, in the author’s imagination, current researchers’ successors will be carrying out. While the primary focus of Challenge papers should be musical scholarship, authors are encouraged to relate research questions to the technical challenges that must be addressed.

Transforming Musicology Challenge papers will be peer reviewed, and accepted papers will be presented at the workshop as either part of a panel or a poster. Challenge papers will not be included in the main workshop proceedings, but will be compiled into a supplement hosted on the workshop website.

While we encourage authors engage with the workshop through the Musicology Challenge track, those who wish their papers to appear in the main proceedings may prefer to submit a more detailed description of their work to the Proceedings Track as a short or long paper (see above).

Important dates

  • Paper submission deadline: 30th June 2017 (23:59 UTC-11)
  • Notification of acceptance: 3rd August 2017
  • Camera ready submission deadline: 15th September 2017
  • Workshop: 28th October 2017

 

WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

Programme Chair

Dr. Kevin PAGE, University of Oxford

Local Chair

Prof. YANG Yandi, Shanghai Conservatory of Music

Publicity and proceedings

David LEWIS, University of Oxford

Programme Committee

TBC