Get to Know BC’s Digital Scholarship Team: Anna Kijas

My role at Boston College Libraries is as a Digital Scholarship Librarian, but I also have degrees in piano literature and performance and musicology. I focus on music criticism and reception of marginalized women musicians/composers during the 19th through early 20th centuries. I also explore, write, and present about how we can better understand or analyze musicians lives, repertoire, and reception through the use of digital tools.

Plainte!
Plainte! 1re. élégie, op. 17 | Teresa Carreño (National Library of Spain)

I am naturally curious and enjoy a hands-on approach to learning, which may be why I am drawn to digital humanities and digital scholarship work. This interest grew out of my own research interests in musicology. While researching the career of Teresa Carreño (1853-1917), Venezuelan pianist and composer, I became interested in discovering ways to document her career through the use of open access and open source tools in order to curate and visualize the impact of her musical career. This interest led me to experimenting with a variety of content management systems, GIS applications, text analysis and visualization tools, which you can read about on my blog.

My background in humanities and own work in musicology enables me to bring a practitioner’s perspective to my approach in working on digital scholarship projects or initiatives with faculty, students, and staff at Boston College. I believe that one of the core building blocks in digital scholarship projects is (meta)data and that process is just as important as the final product.

Header image: Map of Carreño’s early concerts between 1862-1865. CC-BY-NC.


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