The Harkive Project - Computational Analysis and Popular Music Reception

Abstract

Using approaches developed from the emerging fields of digital humanities and cultural analytics, which are commonly associated with the computational turn in the humanities, I have employed similar types of automated data collection and computational and algorithmic analyses to those which are used by key players in the digital music space. The aim of such an approach has been to extract insight from the Harkive dataset that a manual, close reading may not be able to arrive at, but also to attempt to expand our understanding of how data derived knowledge creation works through practice. Such systems are often technically complex and commercially opaque, which has the effect of limiting our understand as popular music scholars of their potential impacts.