For my thesis I will investigate the structure of musical tastes and their development over time.
Applying network analysis and longitudinal methods to ‘big data’ from the music history listening dataset parencite:vigliensonimusic, I will explore how new data sources and techniques can provide further insight into questions in cultural sociology such as the univore-omnivore debate parencite:peterson1996changing,Savage_2011 and integration of music in daily routines parencite:denora2000music.
Research puzzles are thus both methodological and theoretical. # Techniques that allow to process the high-dimensional and dynamically changing structures of the musical field are still a rare sight within cultural sociology (but see cite:vlegels2017music), and their proper application will require substantial effort.
However, I believe these to be worth the investment since it will result in the possibility to analyze both the consumption and production of musical tastes.
Therefore, access to such fine-grained longitudinal (and reliable) data of music consumption allows to study in more detail theoretical question such as the structure of symbolic boundaries parencite:lamont2001symbolic, nd the contingency of evaluation parencite:denora2000music.
It will further as open the door for the study of the change in musical tastes, in particular the development of musical tastes in adolescents, as well as a number of influences on musical tastes, be it from ‘trendsetters’, institutions such as producers and magazines or more distant social developments such as economic indicators.
(org-babel-tangle)
(defun delete-org-comments (backend)
(loop for comment in (reverse (org-element-map (org-element-parse-buffer)
'comment 'identity))
do
(setf (buffer-substring (org-element-property :begin comment)
(org-element-property :end comment))
"")))
(let ((org-export-before-processing-hook '(delete-org-comments)))
(switch-to-buffer (org-latex-export-to-pdf)))asdf