Historical Atlas of European Live Music: Digital Framework

The project aims to create a framework for an unprecedented and sustainable expansion in the application of digital mapping tools(GIS) to the representation of live music ecosystems. While increasingly adopted by researchers and stakeholders, GIS is dedicated tothe visualization of manually collected live music data. Also, reliance on proprietary software is an obstacle towards the integration ofadvanced features such as network analysis and multimedia. As a result, the geographical and temporal scale of these initiativesremains limited and their potential impact untapped. HAELM DF will address these issues through the re-orientation of open-sourcedigital technologies. This will result in the development of two automated collection tools. A scraping workflow for the extraction ofdata from printed sources; a crowdsourcing web-platform for the creation of multimedia maps. These tools will be tested in the citiesof Liverpool, Newcastle, and Hamburg, focusing on a parallel timespan (1960-1962). The data and content collected during the testingphase will be then made accessible within the prototype of a Historical Atlas of European Live Music (HAELM). In this multilayeredinteractive web-map, the user will be able to explore the networks that connect live venues across different cities and that constitutethe broader European music ecosystem. In the same application, the multimedia archive created during the crowdsourcing test phasewill also be accessible, enabling a community-based narration of music heritage. The project includes a personalized training plan ondigital techniques and oral history curation, provided by established experts in the fields. In combination with a secondment at theNewcastle University and a non-academic placement at the business association Hamburg Music, the plans will complement theprofile of the researcher, allowing him to develop the HAELM prototype and its further iterations according to internationalexcellence standards.