Ada Lovelace, Numbers, and Notes—a short journey into music, mathematics and computation at the time of Lovelace and Babbage


If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Ada Lovelace’s notes on music and computation inspired the musical content of the Ada Lovelace Symposium held at the University of Oxford in December, on the 200th anniversary of her birth. These included a short operatic work, two commissioned pieces, and music generated by a simulator of Babbage’s analytical engine. This talk will explain our musicological, mathematical, and computational journey to this event, and reflect on digital scholarship 200 years ago and today.

David De Roure is Professor of e-Science and Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has strategic responsibility for Digital Humanities at Oxford and directed the national Digital Social Research programme for ESRC, for whom he is now a strategic adviser. His personal research is in Computational Musicology, Web Science, and Internet of Things. He is a frequent speaker and writer on digital scholarship and the future of scholarly communications.