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<title>Mapping Virtual Music Events</title>
<link>https://www.american-music.org/forums/posts.aspx?topic=1550689</link>
<description></description>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:03:19 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2020 19:14:03 GMT</pubDate>
<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; 2020 Society for American Music</copyright>
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<item>
<title>Mapping Virtual Music Events</title>
<link>https://www.american-music.org/forums/posts.aspx?topic=1550689</link>
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<description><![CDATA[Hi all,

I'm writing on behalf of myself and my colleague, Andrew McGraw.

Here in Richmond, Virginia, we have started an archive of local music events by “scraping” digital media listings and calendars. The metadata we acquire includes geolocations, dates, images, descriptive text, web-site snapshots (etc), which we can then visualize in, for instance, animated maps of the music-scene. 

But the pandemic has pointed out to us the limitations of attempting to characterize the local scene through live shows only. 

This animated map suggests that the Richmond scene completely died in late March, when Virginia issued a statewide lockdown. 

But since the shutdown we've been seeing a lot of “virtual” local shows listed on social media (FB, instagram). 

This leads to a broader issue. Newspaper and zine print (or scanned) archives are an important source for musicologists analyzing the history and evolution of local scenes. But today even large, established local newspapers are going under, especially in smaller and mid-sized cities. Many zines went online years ago and while there are web archiving projects that might capture pages and blogs, I’m not aware of any archiving projects dedicated to (much more ephemeral) social media. 

With many live shows, and practically all “virtual” shows, being listed today only on social media, we wonder what kind of archive future musicologists will have access to. 

While information about big, national and corporate music acts will surely be preserved by google, the ephemeral nature of social media might make it very difficult for future scholars to research and understand local scenes. 

A question for the list: is anyone aware of any projects attempting to archive musical activities listed or broadcast on social media? (Given FB's squirrelly API this would be a real technical challenge!). 

Thanks! 

You can respond here or to my institutional email address: jlove@richmond.edu]]></description>
<pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2020 20:12:53 GMT</pubDate>
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<title></title>
<link>https://www.american-music.org/forums/posts.aspx?topic=1550690</link>
<guid>https://www.american-music.org/forums/posts.aspx?topic=1550690</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Here is a link to one layer of our current map:  https://dsl-ur.carto.com/u/urichmond/builder/e4ab9360-2613-416a-8147-d7c27b52f6c3/embed]]></description>
<pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2020 20:14:03 GMT</pubDate>
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