Tag: italy

Comparing the Italian and Danish Music Industries

One of the blessings of being a digital humanist is being able to study something as inherently interesting as music. A while ago, I had fun trying to figure out which band was the most important in the Italian music scene. That was cool, but it left open a question, which I want to address today: are the patterns that I’m seeing specific to Italian music, or do they hold in another country?

To answer this question I needed to collect data about at least another country. Lisandro Marco Benetti and Daniel Fejerskov-Quist helped me compile a new dataset about Danish music. The result was the paper we co-authored: “Comparing the Italian and Danish Music Industries With Network Analysis,” which appeared in the journal Complexity earlier this month.

We applied the same methodology as in my previous paper to the bands releasing records in Denmark, to create a network that was directly comparable with the Italian one: bands connected to each other if they share a significant number of artists. Then, we could compare the two to figure out what stayed the same, what was different, and more.

Nodes are bands, connected by artist sharing. Node color is the average year of the band’s releases. Node size is centrality. Edge color is significance. Denmark on the left, Italy on the right.

The overall structure remained largely the same, with clear clustering by music genre and a temporal gradient, as you can see from the picture above. Sure, Denmark is smaller, has fewer bands, and a shorter time span, but overall the important structural properties of the networks are the same.

One new analysis we introduced in this paper is label nestedness. Record labels release music, so it is interesting to understand how specialized they are. When we sort labels by how much music they release, we see a nested pattern: small labels tend to focus on popular genres that are published by almost every label, while the many small specific genres are only published by the largest labels.

The dispersion of bands in the network (y axis) over time. The color background compares the observed value with what we’d expect given the number of records published. Green shows more dispersion than expected, red is less dispersion than expected (white matches expectation). Denmark on the left, Italy on the right.

Things start getting interesting when we look at the differences. For instance, by using network variance, we can quantify how much a year was innovative, by looking at how dispersed across the network the bands releasing records that year are (meaning the releases come from unrelated bands). We can control the amount of music produced, so that we know we’re not just looking at a lot of music, but specifically at a diverse body of music. The figure above shows that Denmark had its peak diversification during the 1980s and 1990s, while Italy was innovative earlier, in the 1970-1980 period.

Other differences include how the two music industries relate to different genres. Some genres show a low degree of specialization — meaning many unrelated bands have played them — in either Italy or Denmark, but not both. For instance, a diverse set of bands had tried to make beat music in Italy at its heyday, but not in Denmark. On the other hand, pop rock crops up across many unrelated Danish bands, not systematically, but this is not true in Italy. Various metal genres are also quite central in Denmark, but marginal in Italy.

The merged Danish-Italian music industry network. Nodes are still bands connected by artist sharing, with their size proportional to their centrality. Blue nodes for Italy, red nodes for Denmark.

The cool thing about this exercise is that, by using a consistent convention in making the dataset, the two networks can be merged. Artists who contributed to both Italian and Danish bands can create links across the countries. The global structure is what you see in the above figure. This significantly changes the centrality calculation. Rather than looking at the most important bands within a country, we are now looking at those bands that tie together two different countries.

Here are three examples:

  • Temperance: this Italian melodic power metal band is central because their records are produced by Jacob Hansen, a key figure in Danish rock / heavy metal;
  • Robertino: an Italian singer who was noticed at age 10 by Danish TV producer Volmer Sørensen, who launched his career;
  • Alex Puddu: an Italian funk artist born in Rome, but who relocated in Copenhagen at age 20*.

This has been fun, but, if you know me, you know that I don’t know when it’s time to quit. Of course the next step is to crank this up to eleven. Are the commonalities we see between Denmark and Italy just a coincidence? What if we add a third country? What if we add thirty? You’ll have to stay tuned, as I’m working on a paper to conclude this trilogy.

* To make the figure above, we used the country of origin to decide the node’s color. Alex Puddu was the one case we couldn’t quite figure out. So Lisandro and Daniel resolved to do the only logical thing, and just wrote Alex himself. He was very kind in answering, with details that would likely be appreciated by my friend Max Schich, as in the end even Alex couldn’t call himself either Italian or Danish. In the end, I flipped a coin 🙂

Yet Another Proof that the Italian Government doesn’t Understand Research

[Warning: this post is not about my research, but it is a pure rant of whiny frustration. Readers are warned.]

As you might have guessed by my clumsy English, I’m not exactly a native speaker. In fact, I’m from Italy. Italian researchers seem to have quite a knack for propelling themselves out of their home country, more than your average researcher from a first-world country. This is because basic research is mostly publicly funded – in Italy the private sector has no patience for something that takes a lot of resources and time, and has a high failure chance – but historically the Italian government never understood that research, eventually, always pays off. For this reason, public research funding has been cut whenever there was the possibility, being judged as an expenditure without returns. Academic careers have been made harder, contracts for researchers shorter. It was with great hopes, then, when last year we saw a change in trend. A new program, called “Scientific Independence of young Researchers” (SIR) was launched. And it looked great.

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The total budget of SIR almost reached 50 million of euros. SIR welcomed projects from all disciplines. Each project could be awarded up to a million euros. The two-phase review process had been modeled on the best practices of the European community. Every Italian researcher currently working abroad would have been salivating just by looking at it. And just like 5000 others, I did too. Before March 13th 2014, the project submission deadline, I submitted my application. That’s when this train wreck started to happen, in a slow-motion that would fit the most cheesy Michael Bay action flick.

As you might have noticed, today is February 26th, 2015. In about two weeks, we’ll celebrate one year since the submission deadline. As of today, SIR hasn’t gotten back to me about my project. This alone is a piece of information that makes me and, presumably, all other applicants fuming with rage. The reasons why this utter disaster is developing in front of us are even more absurd. I didn’t research them carefully, as they are only tangentially related to my point, but I’ll loosely translate from this article.

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The sensual promise of a “European quality” peer review was based on the idea of asking the European Research Council (ERC) to help with the nomination of the review committees. SIR claims to have reached out to the ERC on February 25th, 2014, one month after they published their call for projects. On July 16th, it became clear that the ERC had declined to help, because this sort of thing was not part of their mission or budget (you can read the ERC reply to a concerned researcher who wrote them on July 2014, interestingly enough they claim to have warned SIR well before the call was published). Coincidentally, this is also the time in which SIR claims that the ERC got back to them. SIR appointed its own review committees on October 8th and started working on October 20th, as published on the SIR website*. So long to the “European quality” peer review process.

To sum up: SIR claims to be able to use ERC reviewers, while this is not true. They are so adamant about this claim that they published the call and they checked it only after a month, while ERC already told them before that it was not possible. Next, SIR ignores the problem and goes into oblivious lethargy for 4 months. The sleepy not-so-beauty wakes up and it takes another 3 months to nominate the committees. The committees “work” for 4 months with no completed reviews in sight. And we are talking about the first phase of review. God only knows how the second phase will go.

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Even when it tries, the Italian government does not understand how research works. I’ll spell it out for them. A researcher (hell, any sort of job-seeker) never sends out only one application. It wouldn’t be rational, as any single shot has very low chances of success. If an organization takes a year to reply, everybody who could go somewhere else did. Marie Curie grant applications were due on September 11th and final jury/committee decisions were sent out on February 4th. Less than 5 months and we got a final answer. Everybody who submitted both SIR and Marie Curie, and got a Marie Curie grant, will accept the latter. Everybody who submitted both SIR and anything else, and got into anything else, will accept that anything rather than the SIR offer, assuming for the sake of the argument that SIR will ever make one.

This tragicomedy will end in the least bad case scenario with Italy handing over almost 50 million Euros to C-rated projects, because if a project was any good it would have been accepted anywhere else before. In the worst case scenario, this will be a contest in which everybody loses. Even worse, researchers for whom 2015 was the last year in which they fit the requirements to apply, are effectively booted out of the contest.

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I don’t want to make this a political issue. This post isn’t pro- or anti- government. My point is that, in Italy, your only hope to do primary research is to do so with public money. And if you, Italian government, are the only hope, at least be straightforward. We have a saying in Italy: si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when we were worse off”), which is pretty stupid, but here it applies. At least with the previous governments we researcher knew we were personae non gratae and we left. Now, instead, we are just part of a big commedia dell’arte. We are told we are important, we are welcomed to come back home, but once we get in from the door they throw us out from the window. No wonder Italy is lagging behind in innovation.

* One among other things that makes you feel like you’re being treated like a retard is that all news items in the SIR website regarding the review process overwrite the previous news item. So every time SIR promises that reviews will be done by day X, and day X comes, they just remove any trace of the promise and make a new promise (proof: screenshot on February 17th and on February 23rd). It doesn’t help either that the “News Archive” page doesn’t actually contain a news archive…