FOLK SONGS
I presented the update of the folk songs investigation with Daniel in the Investigation Meeting on the 2nd May. Before the meeting, we updated the investigation section describing the different steps undertaken from January to April, and I summarized some key insights in the following file.
Reflections on the folk songs investigation.pdf
We received a very positive feedback and suggestions for next steps. The summary of the meeting can be found here. Key action points have been the following:
After the meeting, I created a descriptive table of the categories emerged from the Boardman anthology. I look forward to compare this table with Daniel’s categories and discuss them in a dedicated meeting with Alex, Sarah, Kaspar, Kunika and anyone interested. I feel that identifying potential datasets/data types that can be connected by each different category will be a key point to identify our final annotation schema. I invite all the team members reading this page, to comment this preliminary schema and make their own suggestions.
Categories emerged from the first round of annotation of the Folk Songs & Ballads of Lancashire edited by Harry and Lesley Boardman.
| Categories | Description | Notes on connectivity |
|---|---|---|
| Animal | Words related to animals as part of the social/domestic/economic life. | Potential connections with literary sources & social history museums. |
| Body | Words related to body parts. We are particularly interested when they are used in relationship with machines/working tools and can express the physical conditions of the work. | Potential connections with hospital records & social history museums. |
| Economy | Words related to the economic dimension of the textile industry and working life (e.g. ‘wage’, ‘money’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’) | Potential connections with market-related records, trade directories & social history museums. |
| Emotion | Words/adjectives related to the emotional dimension. | Potential connection with Oral History archives (but this aspect might be better highlighted from Sentiment Analysis) |
| Everyday objects | Words describing everyday objects which can be part of the domestic/working life (e.g. bottle, table). It can also include non-object things like ‘dust’. | Potential connections with literary sources & social history museums. |
| Family | Words describing personal/family relationships (e.g. wife, father, children) | Potential connections with literary sources & social history museums. |
| Figurative expression | Expression with connotative meaning that can be understood in a particular historical context/social condition (such as ‘Hard Times’). Sayings or expressions like ‘as blind as a bat’ can also be included in this category. | Potential connection with literary sources. |
| Food | Words related to food culture. | Potential connection with folk culture, social history museums & oral history transcriptions. |
| Interpretative text | Section of the transcript where the song is introduced, explaining its meaning and historical context. | |
| Location | Geographical places mentioned in the song which are identifiable in a map. This might include dialectal/colloquialism terms to indicate places that need to be translated/recognised. | Connection with physical places, place-based archives & datasets such as Historic England. |
| Material | Words related to raw material (particularly interesting for us the industry-related material such as cotton, wool, silk). | Potential connection with the description field of museum collections. |
| Person (identifiable) | Real people who were part of the textile history and can be identified in archives/census data or historical repositories of various kind. In framing this category, it might be interesting to reflect on the definition of ‘notable’ entity given by Wikipedia. | Potential connection with Wikipedia entries, census data, historical figures mentioned in the description field of museum collections. |
| Industrial Object | Words identifying industry-specific objects such as machines, tools, machine components. | Potential connection with the objects held in industrial museums. |
| Sound | Words/Expressions describing a sonic dimension related to the working or personal life (e.g. the noise of the machines). | Potential connection with sound archives, audio recordings on the web. |
| Subject | Words/expressions identifying a subject in a song (such as the name of a non-identifiable person such as ‘Johnny’ or a figurative subject like ‘devil’). | |
| Professions/Occupations | Words defining professions (we are particularly interested in the industry-related professions such as weaver). | Potential connections with census data, trade directories, description field in museum collections. |
| Products | Words expressing the range of different products created by the textile industry (garments, clothes). | Potential connection with Art, Design collections and thesauruses |
| Venues | Places without a specific geographical location which identify venues or sites of activities (such as ‘home’, ‘mill’). | Connection with place-based archives & datasets such as Historic England and description field in museum collections. |
I will share the same table with Jennifer alongside a Word file including my first round of annotations. Before sending the file to Jennifer, I edited my previous comments in order to ask her specific questions on words, expressions and potential connections with collection data.
In parallel, I began to experiment with potential annotation tools, and I came across a platform specifically designed to annotate song lyrics called Genius. Originally created for annotating hip-hop music, the platforms developed to include also folk songs & historically related songs.
I found it extremely inspiring especially looking ahead at the future stage of the folk songs pipeline, as it might help us to understand how a crowdsourcing platform dedicated to song lyrics might work, so I took a series of screenshot on the functionalities/sections which I found most interesting for us.
