— San Francisco, Tuesday 27 May 2014

In between two conferences it might be a good time to write a first post on what I am doing, and will be doing over the coming weeks. I am actually in the USA, on a three-week ‘study trip’, to focus my time a bit more on my PhD research and musicology, which is usually more difficult in a regular working week at home. Below a description of the activities I will pursue during my stay – besides some serious PhD reading & writing. 😉

Music Encoding
Last week I visited the Music Encoding Conference. For my reflections on this meeting, see this post.

CMME website
This week I will be working on enhancing the CMME website, together with the project founding director, musicologist and web developer Ted Dumitrescu. Besides updating the content of the site and giving it a more ‘contemporary’ appearance, the underlying data structure (currently a PostgreSQL 7.3.10 database) will be reconsidered. Moving the data to a Linked Data oriented format like RDF will open up the possibilities of machine interaction with the CMME data.

Network Science
In my last week in the USA, I will visit two events of the NetSci 2014 conference (at the University of California, Berkeley CA). I will start with one day of the NetSci school, to refresh my knowledge of (the basics of) network theory. On my second day in Berkeley the annual Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks meeting takes place. The topic of this event is exactly the cross point of disciplines I am working in: humanities and network theory. Besides the relevance of the papers presented, I hope to revive/renew the contacts I made at the 2013 edition of this meeting in Copenhagen, and meet some new people of course.

The next posts on this blog will present some of my experiences and/or related thoughts.