FactGrid:Musical Subscriptions

The Sharp Family, by Johann Zoffany, between 1779 and 1781. The challenge: identify the individuals and follow them as customers to see how their tastes had been developing before they took the picture

• Project by Simon D. I. Fleming and Martin Perkins

Introduction

The data set presented with the following basic queries can be fully (and presently far better) accessed on its home page:

• https://musicsubscribers.co.uk/

It encompasses a total of 156,172 subscriptions listed in 768 musical titles that were published from the late 17th into the early 19th century by anglophone publishers on the British Isles and in the colonies. The selected titles comprise worldly and sacred music, music theory and various sorts of related entertainment.

The homepage's database has far straighter abilities to digest the basic information of the entries. FactGrid is an encyclopaedic graph database that shows its own advantages as soon as we begin to identify agents behind the subscriptions: men, women, music clubs, choirs, booksellers, which can now gain informational backgrounds from all sides. The set is here basically an invitation to provide and (with the P282 property) to link identifications to the searches. The set is intriguing: Music was bought by people of all walks of life. Subscriptions gave visibility to individual and professional customers and they document the flow of books. The software allows individual identifications, yet it will also make it possible to download selections in order to mine them with artificial intelligence. FactGrid is here a platform that will allow joint work on the set.

Dataset

• All publications of the data set: 768 titles
• All subscriptions of the 768 titles: 156,172 entries

Sample Queries

• All musical subscriptions of George Frederick Handel (change name in line 4)

• All titles ordered by the Academy of Ancient Music

• All works authored/composed by William Walond
• All works ordered by a Musical Society
• All works ordered by an organisation; what kind of organisation is it?

Maps

Musical societies as subscribers of Music, screenshot

• The publications, where printed
• Types of organisations that are ordering books (totally incomplete)

Statistics

Places of publication by decade

• Places of publication by decade
• Worldly/Sacred disparity