Short paper presentation at the The 1st International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2014) 12TH SEPTEMBER 2014 (FULL DAY), LONDON, UK in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE Digital Libraries conference 2014.

1. Executable Music Documents
David De Roure
e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
@dder

2. The digital music research community as an
exemplar of future scholarly practice.
What can we learn for Digital Libraries?
What can we learn from Digital Libraries?
• Defamiliarisation
• Execution
• Translation

3. A revolutionary idea…
Open Science!
rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org

4. http://www.music-ir.org/mirex
The
Social
Machine

5. http://www.scilogs.com/eresearch/pages-of-history/ David De Roure

6. Big data elephant versus sense-making network?
Iain Buchan
The challenge is to foster the co-constituted socio-technical
system on the right i.e. a computationally-enabled sense-making
network of expertise, data, models, software, visualisations and
narratives

7. human
as author
human
as reader
narrative
about
software
machine
as reader
David De Roure

8. I believe that the time is ripe for
significantly better
documentation of programs, and
that we can best achieve this by
considering programs to be works
of literature…
Instead of imagining that our
main task is to instruct a
computer what to do, let us
concentrate rather on explaining
to human beings what we want a
computer to do.
Knuth, Donald E. (1984). "Literate Programming”. The
Computer Journal (British Computer Society) 27 (2): 97–111.

10. … a computer language is not just a way of
getting a computer to perform operations
but rather that it is a novel formal medium
for expressing ideas about methodology.

11. The Journal of Open Research Software
(JORS) features peer reviewed Software
Metapapers describing research software
with high reuse potential.
We are working with a number of specialist
and institutional repositories to ensure that
the associated software is professionally
archived, preserved, and is openly available.
Equally importantly, the software and the
papers will be citable, and reuse will be
tracked.
http://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/

13. Meandre seasr.org/meandre
Steven Downie

14. The Evolution of myExperiment
Research Objects
Workflows
Computational
Research Objects
Packs
OAI
ORE
W3C PROV
Social Objects

15. The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research
Object
Principles

16. Notifications and automatic re-runs
Autonomic
Curation
Machines are users too
Self-repair
New research?
David De Roure

17. Executable
Documents
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stacks_in_Michigan_State_University_library.JPG

18. consume
produce
compose
perform
capture
distribute
Steve Benford plus curation, preservation, …

19. Digital Music Object
Mark Sandler

20. Fusing Audio
and Semantic
Technologies for
Intelligent Music
Production and
Consumption
Future of Research
Communication
and e-Scholarship
end to end digital systems
research objects
PI: Mark Sandler

21. • Will digital libraries provide the infrastructure to execute documents,
or will people deploy them on alternative infrastructures? What are
the implications for discovery, curation, and its automation?
• Who gains credit and owns the intellectual property generated when
a document runs automatically? Who is liable for damage that
arises? What are the implications of unintended or accidental
assembly of research methods and outcomes?
• What are the implications of research that occurs at very high speed,
possibly speculatively, without human intervention? Where is the
(critical, creative, subversive) human in the loop? Are we ‘burning’
research methods into an automated research platform?
• How do executable documents sit in the social websites of
discovery, authoring, publishing and sharing; i.e. the ecosystem of
scholarly social machines?
David De Roure

22. Scholarly practice is changing
profoundly as we embrace new
methods of digital research and
engage society.
Our centuries-old research
communication practices
that underpin scholarship
are to be celebrated —
but are they still fit for
their purpose?

23. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
Thanks to: Tim Crawford, Stephen Downie, Ben Fields,
Ichinaro Fujinaga, Steve Benford, Kevin Page, Mark
Sandler, Geraint Wiggins.
http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/executable-music-documents

24. www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@dder