(This is the short piece that I submitted to the SIG USE Awards Jury for consideration for the Master’s Student Travel Grant, which I am the lucky and thankful recipient of. Participating in ASIS&T’s Annual Meeting in Vancouver will definitely be one of the highlights of this year. Thank you SIG USE!)
Music is perhaps one of the few ways through which people from different cultures make connections with each other. Once you find a common music interest or passion with someone — especially if it is a rather unusual one — it can turn into hours of mutual sharing and appreciation. Much research has been done in the field of information seeking behaviour, information retrieval, information architecture and system design to facilitate such activities. With all the advances in the field, there remains a much neglected but emerging research area, namely, how musical knowledge is being renegotiated in the information age.
The difference of scope lies in the distinction between information, and knowledge. A tension exists in the idea that music is some how ‘universal’, yet culturally unique. (Click here to read the rest of my position paper.)
