America’s Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media

FAIN: HAA-280975-21

University of Richmond (Richmond, VA 23173-0001)
Andrew McGraw (Project Director: January 2021 to present)
Joanna Katherine Love (Co Project Director: June 2021 to present)

A series of workshops to identify best practices for automatically collecting and archiving online data about musical events.

Our project responds to a new crisis in American music scholarship: the digital revolution has led to the digitization or dissolution of traditional archival sources (like newspapers and magazines) crucial to studying local music scenes. And while existing web archiving projects capture some relevant content, they are biased towards established genres and artists and miss most events advertised solely through social media—a difficult dataset to capture, yet essential to understanding 21st-century music-making. This project thus convenes fourteen interdisciplinary humanities scholars and technologists to: 1) explore and propose best practices for automatically collecting and archiving digital music event data by geographic location; 2) develop a pilot sample of music-related social media data and; 3) build upon previous Digital Humanities work to analyze the datasets and reveal their humanistic potential for future scholarship.

Media Coverage

Faculty Create Innovative Archive of American Music with NEH Grant (Media Coverage)
Author(s): University of Richmond Staff
Publication: UR Now
Date: 10/18/2021
Abstract: As coverage of American music increasingly goes digital, historians don’t have access to a paper trail to track local artists. Music professors Joanna Love and Andy McGraw have received a grant to try and change that.
URL: https://urnow.richmond.edu/features/article/-/20456/faculty-create-innovative-archive-of-american-music-with-neh-grant.html?utm_source=email-URNow&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=19-10-2021&utm_content=features&utm_order=2&utm_format=half-width&utm_title_length=long&utm_topic_slug=research-&-innovation&utm_story_alignment=left

Associated Products

America’s Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media (Web Resource)
Title: America’s Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media
Author: Andrew McGraw
Author: Joanna Love
Abstract: American music scholarship reveals the cultural connections, disconnections, influences and inspirations within and between our communities. As a means of linking and intersecting communities, our music scenes—an interconnected intellectual, artistic, social, economic, and cultural industry of musicians, instructors, technicians, venue-owners, non-profits, recording studios, and audiences—are indicative of the sonic health of our nation. Understanding how Americans connect to, or mishear, one another through music reveals challenges to and opportunities for forging a “more perfect” union. On this page we will post the ongoing findings of a project on the digital archiving of contemporary American music scenes. This project involves a team of interdisciplinary musicologists, humanists, and computer scientists from several institutions. Dr. Andy McGraw and Dr. Joanna Love (University of Richmond) are co-Principal Investigators for the project.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://audible-rva.org/american-music-scenes-in-the-age-of-social-media/
Primary URL Description: https://audible-rva.org/american-music-scenes-in-the-age-of-social-media/

Live Music Archiver Chrome Extension Scraper and Archive (Computer Program)
Title: Live Music Archiver Chrome Extension Scraper and Archive
Author: Benjamin Leach
Abstract: We worked with a developer to create a customizable, Chrome extension scraper for capturing live music event data both from websites and Instagram: Live Music Archiver. The scraper went through two extensive development and testing phases, and is currently freely available on GitHub.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/broem/live-music-archiver-extension
Access Model: Open Access
Source Available?: Yes

Whitepaper: America's Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media (Blog Post)
Title: Whitepaper: America's Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media
Author: Andrew McGraw
Author: Joanna K. Love
Abstract: This white paper discusses findings from a fall 2021–summer 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities project, which convened eleven interdisciplinary humanities scholars, including musicologists, music archivists, I.P. and digital humanities experts, and computer scientists across the U.S. to explore and propose best practices for automatically collecting and archiving digital live music event data by geographic location. Our Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project thus aimed to build upon previous research begun by Dr. Andrew McGraw in 2013 about Richmond, Virginia’s local music scene (McGraw, 2021). In our efforts to expand the Richmond-based archive—which had already provided invaluable revelations about the city’s socio-economic disparities and cultural values from seemingly neutral datasets (such as liquor licensing, venue locations, and noise complaints)—we aimed to generate a larger archive that might open new research possibilities and revelations for future music scholarship, such as helping music scholars and other humanities researchers to better analyze data about music education, access, and infrastructure in particular regions, and finding important interdisciplinary humanities insights about twenty-first century, post-pandemic music-making.
Date: 08/01/2023
Primary URL: https://audible-rva.org/americas-music-scenes-in-the-age-of-social-media/
Blog Title: White Paper
Website: AudibleRVA

Digital Humanities Approaches to Archiving U.S. Music Scenes (Article)
Title: Digital Humanities Approaches to Archiving U.S. Music Scenes
Author: Andrew McGraw
Author: Joanna K Love
Author: Chris Cotropia
Author: Louis Epstein
Author: Gregg D. Kimball
Author: Robert K. Nelson
Author: Matthew Oware
Author: Doug Turnbull
Author: Andrew Weaver
Author: John Vallier
Author: Yucong Jiang
Abstract: This roundtable reflects on the work completed by eleven interdisciplinary scholars during the exploratory phase of a live music digital archiving project, ‘America’s Music Scenes in the Age of Social Media’. During the project’s two-year National Endowment for the Humanities, Level 1 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2021–2023), the team explored and proposed best practices for automatically collecting and archiving live music event data by geographic location. In an effort to capture important information about live local music scenes and their communities—which has become increasingly ephemeral since the decline of print sources and the COVID-19 pandemic—the team developed an open-access live music archiving scraper tool, and collected a sample dataset from venue websites and Instagram posts throughout the state of Virginia. The four main sections of this roundtable reflect on the project’s methodology and data, using it to contextualize the importance, challenges, outcomes, and future potentials for analyzing live music event data. Each deploys specific disciplinary lenses to demonstrate how and why humanities interventions remain imperative for analyzing such data.
Year: 2023
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Submitted to Digital Humanities Quarterly

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