Anna Jordanous

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers increasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are underexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data practices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic collections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract semantic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, enhancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each others work.

Investigating the role of score following in automatic musical accompaniment

Abstract When suitable accompanists are not available to a soloist musician, an alternative possibility is to use computer-generated accompaniment. A computer accompanist should interact with the soloist and adapt to the soloists playing as a human accompanist would, both reacting to expressive nuances of tempo and to unintentional errors such as wrong or mistimed notes. Over the past 25 years, accompaniment systems have been developed, all of which employ some form of score following: the process of following a musicians progress through the score of a piece during performance. This work considers the role of score following in automatic accompaniment. In this investigation we developed a computer accompanist that employs score following. Our computer musician uses Hidden Markov Models to model the score by metrical structure and to provide accompaniment to a soloist playing monophonic music in real time, as the soloist is playing. Working with MIDI input/output, it tracks tempo fluctuations, anticipates the soloists next note and supports some amount of unintentional deviation from the score. Qualitative evaluation, by human testers, and quantitative evaluation, using measurable criteria taken from MIREX, reported that the system performs adequately. We then used interviews with eight human accompanists to consider how well a score following system models the accompaniment process. This evaluation raises questions about the musical interaction between soloist and accompanist that have received relatively little attention. The information we gathered from interviews suggests the importance of other aspects of accompaniment, such as the sharing of shape of the performance between musicians, rather than treating the accompanist as purely subservient. We discuss the implications of these issues for the design of automated accompanists.

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in Londons electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UKs cultural economy.

Has computational creativity successfully made it “Beyond the Fence” in musical theatre?

ABSTRACT A significant test for software is to task it with replicating human performance, as done recently with creative software and the commercial project Beyond the Fence (undertaken for a television documentary Computer Says Show). The remit of this project was to use computer software as much as possible to produce “the worlds first computer-generated musical”. Several creative systems were used to generate this musical, which was performed in Londons West End in 2016. This paper considers the challenge of evaluating this project. Current computational creativity evaluation methods are ill-suited to evaluating projects that involve creative input from multiple systems and people. Following recent inspiration within computational creativity research from interaction design, here the DECIDE evaluation framework is applied to evaluate the Beyond the Fence project. Evaluation finds that the project was reasonably successful at achieving the task of using computational generation to produce a credible musical. Lessons have been learned for future computational creativity projects though, particularly for affording creative software more agency and enabling software to interact with other creative partners. Upon reflection, the DECIDE framework emerges as a useful evaluation “checklist” (if not a tangible operational methodology) for evaluating multiple creative systems participating in a creative task.

Enhancing information retrieval and resource discovery from data using the Semantic Web

Data are everywhere. Often the sheer quantities of data that is stored or archived in repositories or digital libraries make it difficult to navigate data; information in the data is obscured, particularly where we have Big Data. Traditionally, we record metadata on our data items to assist data classification and some information retrieval. The Semantic Web enables us to further unlock and enrich our data, by exploring how different data are related or connected. Using ontologies and Linked Data we can declare, navigate and discover semantic relationships. Relationships exist both locally, within the data, and globally, such that we can enhance our data with information retrieved from a wider context. To illustrate how the application of Semantic Web technologies aids data discovery and information retrieval, I discuss two case studies: (1) Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS), a Dynamic Library of information on selected ancient wisdom literature; and (2) the DEFRA DTC archive, a repository of data about freshwater quality in the UK.

Digital Ecosystems Technologies (DEST), 2012 6th IEEE International Conference on

Ancient texts represent a primary source for research in the classics. A substantial body of digital material has evolved enriching these texts. Unfortunately these data are often distributed across myriad locations, stored in diverse and incompatible formats and are either not available online or are made available only in isolation. This paper describes an investigation into using linked data principles and technologies to build bridges between these islands of data to deliver an integrated data landscape through which researchers can explore and so seek to understand this data. The evaluation revealed that researchers were of the opinion that the linked data representation, and its visualisation as graphs, offers an intuitive and usable means of exploring and understanding the data, exceeding the capabilities offered by current online portals to classics data.

Evaluating machine creativity

Can a computer be creative? And what can we learn about our own creativity from studying computational creativity? My research offers a comprehensive and practically useful investigation into how to evaluate the level of creativity demonstrated by computational systems. How should something so subjective as creativity be measured? I argue that it is most productive to treat creativity as a collection of inter-related factors such as originality, value and productivity, which are more tightly defined and therefore more amenable to measurement. Potential factors are being derived from empirical studies examining a wide variety of our writings on creativity. These will be tested in a simulation of a creative environment: the best performing factors will be applied to evaluation of existing creative systems, in comparison to assessments made by human judges. The aim of this is to identify key components for creativity, giving insight into how to approach the evaluation and improvement of computational systems and also towards human creativity as well.

Report on the Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity

The Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC’17)1 was hosted at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from June 19th - June 23rd, 2017. The ICCC’17 organising committee consisted of Ashok Goel (General Chair), Kazjon Grace (Workshop Co-chair), Matthew Guzdial (Media Chair), Mikhail Jacob (Local Chair), Anna Jordanous (Program Co-chair), Ruli Manurung (Workshop Co-chair) and Alison Pease (Program Co-chair). This report summarises the main topics addressed.

Gnome on the range: finding the hypertextual narratives in ancient wisdom texts

In this paper we present the Sharing Ancient WisdomS (SAWS) project. Working with wisdom texts, or gnomologia, the project aims to produce an enhanced digital scholarly edition of the collected manuscripts which both makes the Greek, Arabic and Spanish texts available and demonstrates the hypertexual nature of these texts. By positioning the texts as collections of sayings, of which a given manuscript only shows one narrative path, we demonstrate how a hypertextual approach allows us to explore alternate narrative paths within and across the texts and support researchers as they study the context, significance and transmission of the wisdoms within these works.