Lessons learned in a large-scale project to digitize and computationally analyze musical scores
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many areas of the digital humanities (DH) have the potential to benefit greatly from recent advances in machine learning, big data, and statistical analysis. These sophisticated techniques come with pitfalls, however, and their accidental misuse can lead to erroneous results. This article outlines in broad terms our experiences with a large-scale, long-term international project to digitize musical scores, automatically analyze them, and share the results with other researchers. It then describes our experiences in order to help other researchers in the DH avoid some of the missteps we and other DH researchers have made. In addition to issues associated with data mining, this article also discusses approaches to sharing data, software, and intermediate analyses such that they are accessible to other researchers in ways that encourage repeatability, verifiability, iterative refinement, creative exploration, and multidisciplinary collaboration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".