The use of data in humanitites research to deliver new insights with examples from the music and film industries

These are my notes on the UKSG Forum 2014  2014 presentation by Roger Press, Managing director, Academic Rights Press Ltd

Academic Rights Press (ARP) is a publisher of academic databases featuring exclusive content sets for scholarly research, teaching and learning. The platforms deliver innovative and easy to use functionality to enable researchers, faculty and students to benefit from the best of contemporary research tools. This leads to innovative scholarship and the opening up of new areas of study. The subject areas include Law, Entertainment, Music, Philosophy, English Letters, Women Writers, Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Social Sciences/Humanities and Health and Medical.

The work of Academic Rights Press is intended to rigorously bring about a cultural change in the humanities by bringing data into service of these disciplines.

Roger commented on the differences between STEM subjects and the Humanities concerning research data. In simplistic terms, STEM subjects often rely on measurements, testing and results whilst Humanities subjects often rely on researcher observation and interpretation. However, research in the humanities is gearing more and more toward the use of datasets in informing their research.
In particular, historical datasets from big business have demonstrably been put to scholarship and the insights from these companies are driving many areas of research. ARP services help to put some of these datasets to work for the researcher.

Roger gave the example of a researcher who was able to measure the contemporary impact of books published in the 1800’s, in part due to sales and manufacturing data from the era. Other disciplines are deriving social tends through monitoring data on television and film.  By bringing data into right format and platform (i.e. via a service like ARP), this allows researchers to find new insights from existing data. In the case of social trends, very often this can now be monitored in real time –a live social commentary.

As an example for data from the music industry, Roger showed some relative pitch graphs from a research project showing how sales for the ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson were massively overtaken by a previously unknown grunge metal band Nirvana. This pre-existing data was available to the researcher from Neilson via ARP.

The research also revealed that longer term over the decade; the heavy metal band Metallic trumped them both. Here’s to the die-hard heavy metal fan!

Making historical datasets available offers the opportunity to investigate fascinating research questions that could not be answered before.

There are echoes in my brain of the BBC’s Doomsday project as a good example of this kind of research (aside from the digital obsolescence problems they had in the 80’s).

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