CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are among the first recipients of new grant funding to advance digital scholarship in cultural institutions, through a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The first round of NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions grants provides funding to eight teams of international researchers for collaborative projects. The program aims to develop new methods of sharing culture and heritage with global audiences, open new research frontiers and advance collections-based research methods.
Gabriel Solis, a music professor and the head of the theatre department, is the project director of “New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies: Music Information Retrieval and AI Support for Jazz Scholarship in Digital Archives,” a collaboration with City, University of London.
A team of musicologists, computer scientists and jazz archivists is using artificial intelligence and music information-retrieval tools to enhance access to archival jazz collections, including those held by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Newark and the Scottish Jazz Archive.
The team will build “smart” search capacities based on music information-retrieval algorithms. Its research will allow for automated transcription and melodic pattern analysis of audio collections in jazz archives, furthering new discoveries in the audio recordings held by archives that have not circulated widely as commercial releases. Linking this audio information to other kinds of archival holdings relating to the music and musicians, such as texts and images, will give the jazz world new tools to further understand the music’s rich history, Solis said.
Glen Worthey, the associate director for research support services at the HathiTrust Research Center, is the project director of “AEOLIAN (Artificial intelligence for cultural organizations),” a collaboration with Loughborough University in the U.K.
The project will bring together a team of experts to develop and examine new approaches – particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning – for improving access to and use of digital collections that are currently restricted due to privacy concerns or copyright protection. The objectives are to make the digital collections more accessible; to analyze them using innovative AI research methods; and to identify potential collaborations between U.S. and U.K. cultural organizations, Worthey said.
The research team will organize six online workshops over two years; grow the international network of scholars working with digital archives; and produce a major interdisciplinary report on the uses of AI at cultural institutions, along with a series of agenda-setting scholarly publications, Worthey said.
The collaborative effort is being led by the HathiTrust Research Center, which is co-hosted by the School of Information Sciences. It involves partnerships with several U.S. and U.K. universities and libraries, and digital humanities research scholars.
Editor’s note: A list of NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions grant recipients can be found online.
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