Reading a scanned book

I have recently been working on extracting data on women composers from the various sources listed in this previous article. The first source on that list is a scanned copy of a French translation of a book – Les femmes compositeurs de musique – compiled in 1910 by Otto Ebel. It is available at archive.org here. Although I’ve not had great success in the past in extracting usable data from scanned books, this appears to be a reasonably tidy scan of Ebel, which looks like a useful source on women composers, so I thought I would give it a go. Continue reading →

Encyclopedia of Women Composers

I have just taken delivery of a good ex-library copy of the weighty two-volume ‘International Encyclopedia of Women Composers’ by Aaron I Cohen,1 which will be useful for some research I am doing (as well as for writing some materials to accompany a series of concerts by the excellent Bristol Ensemble next year). The encyclopedia weights about 3½kg, has almost 1,200 pages, and lists 6,196 women composers spanning all continents and over four millennia. Each entry includes brief biographical details, lists of works, and references for further reading. Continue reading →

This is not a book!

This website is about how to use statistical techniques to study music history. It is based on my PhD thesis, and on more recent work developing the techniques, investigating various topics in music history, and discovering new datasets and ways of understanding them.

It is perhaps more common to develop a PhD thesis into a book, and I have considered this option. But a website seems a more sensible way to go, for three main reasons… Continue reading →