[MEI-L] Music and Digital Humanities: Today (2. March): Anna Kijas; 9. March: Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl

[David M. Weigl]

Reminder: Distinguished Lecture Series in Music and Digital Humanities.

We are pleased to announce today's opening lecture of the Distinguished 
Lecture Series in Music and Digital Humanities taking place at mdw — 
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The Series is streamed 
via Zoom, and both in-person and remote participation is free. 
Organisers: Chanda VanderHart, PhD and David M. Weigl, PhD.

Today's lecture will be given by Anna E. Kijas, Assistant Directory of 
Digital Scholarship and Lilly Music Library at Tufts University:

"Socially Responsible Digital Humanities during Precarious Times"

The lecture will start at 17:00 (Vienna/CET).

Please refer to https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/music-dh for instructions on 
joining us!

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The following lecture will be held on 9 March 2026, 17:00 (Vienna/CET):

“Hand in Hand”: Adventures in Interdisciplinary Digital Musicology
Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl

In 1999 David Huron hailed the dawning of a new, data-rich era and 
proliferation of systematic tooling, a “new empiricism”, ushering in a 
paradigm shift for musicology, uniting the musical sciences and the 
humanities. A quarter century later, algorithms and tools for working 
with music information have proliferated, yet remain largely disregarded 
by (historical) musicologists. Overcoming the siloing of disciplines is 
difficult; per Fleck, scientific communities tend to resist ideas and 
methods that contradict their shared intellectual framework, 
assumptions, and conventions. Addressing this gap effectively requires 
an intentional approach to interdisciplinary collaboration where domain 
experts meet at eye-level. Interdisciplinary design must be structural, 
not cosmetic, with research questions formulated from varied 
perspectives. Tool development must incorporate user needs into the 
design process. Institutional proximity matters – with experts across 
the divide communicating on a daily, rather than quarterly, basis. 
Finally, in true cross-domain collaboration, participants must be 
willing to become novices again. This requires tolerating uncertainty, 
asking basic questions, and occasionally appearing uninformed in front 
of one’s peers.  Without a shared willingness to speak imperfectly 
across disciplinary lines, to not know, and to (re)learn, 
interdisciplinary projects risk becoming either dominated by one field 
or paralyzed by mutual defensiveness. Against this backdrop, we report 
on digital music research conducted at our institute over several recent 
research projects, in dialogue with the wider digital musicology 
community. We lay out the research questions that motivated our 
projects, introduce tools developed and implemented within them, and 
demonstrate their application for both research and dissemination, 
centering musicological data in visible, sharable, citable structures.

Chanda VanderHart, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the Center for Applied 
Music Research at the University in Krems and a Postdoctoral Research 
Associate at the mdw. Her current work sits at the intersection of 
musicology, gender studies, and cultural sociology. A certified Data 
Steward, she publishes extensively on gender, music history, and 
cultural institutions, often employing digital methods to challenge 
androcentric histories.

David M. Weigl, PhD, is a Senior Scientist at the mdw, specialised in 
digital music research. His work focuses on the modelling of information 
behaviour and on the application of Web technologies and Linked Data 
approaches to support digital scholarship. He has led several research 
projects in this area, including ‘Signature Sound Vienna,’ an 
interdisciplinary investigation of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s 
Concert series, and ‘Let’s Encode!,’ establishing a Citizen-Science 
infrastructure for the encoding and validation of music scores.