Please join us for a series of Thursday afternoon workshops with Macgeorge Fellow Richard Freedman (John C. Whitehead '43 Professor of Humanities at Haverford College).

These hands-on workshops are designed for anyone interested in learning more about digital approaches to the study of music. The focus will be on ‘metadata’ (the who, what, when and where of musical artefacts), and how we can model them in digital form. Using a few case studies (data from the famous Golden Record and the Beatles Songbook, as well as from leading Australian music archives, and even datasets of your own!), participants will learn how we collect, organize, clean, analyze and interpret music metadata using various tools—especially Python and Pandas (a powerful library for data analysis).

You will come away with a new understanding of how digital tools work—and you will also learn to think critically about how information about music is organized, and the values implicit in the archives through which it is curated, discovered, and shared. No previous experience with code or musical notation is required. (But those with either or both will also find interesting things to do and learn!)

You can sign up for as many workshops as you like – but we encourage you to attend all five! Scroll down to find the date, time and description of each workshop.

Prof Freedman inaugurates these workshops with a Macgeorge Lecture on 27 August 2026. Register for the lecture.

The workshops also culminate in a Study Day on 1 October 2026. Register for the colloqium.

Image: Drew Echberg

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