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Free keywords:
Musikwissenschaft, Fachgeschichte, Netzwerk
Abstract:
The dichotomy Carl Dahlhaus-Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht appears to be legendary for West German musicology. It has been quite common to assume that since the 1960s and even after Dahlhaus’ death in 1989, musicologists have been very strongly oriented towards these two persons, but actually only either Dahlhaus or Eggebrecht. But can such a legend be verified in information technology? How, if necessary, can one grasp and make understandable academic networks? We have searched the entire MGG-Online for references to the names of Dahlhaus and Eggebrecht, we looked at Festschriften dedicated to Dahlhaus or Eggebrecht with regard to the persons who are marked in the texts/books as important for the two professors (also ‘pupils’, assistants, students etc.). All professional cooperations manifested through publications were also considered, including persons whose texts were edited by Dahlhaus or Eggebrecht. These data were converted into the format of a graph database and visualized. The resulting graph shows a polarized network but a small group with connections to both lead figures, too. Eggebrecht’s network reveals a remarkable gap regarding connections to members of his own generation. Dahlhaus’ personal network seems to be significantly bigger but less intense regarding the relation quality. The findings exemplify the possibilities and limitations of the evaluation of historical data by graph database technologies.
