Dottorato in Patrimonio Culturale e produzione storico-artistica, audiovisiva e multimediale

Valentín Mansilla graduated with a degree in Music from the National University of the Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina). He obtained a scholarship from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and worked under the guidance of the ethnomusicologist Miguel Ángel García and the musicologist Marisa Restiffo. His previous research focuses on historical ethnomusicology, with a particular emphasis on the Mocoví culture of the southern Chaco region.

He was involved in research projects related to the intersection between sonic-musical practices, history, anthropology and archival studies. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Historical Musicology Group 'Córdoba,' led by Leonardo Waisman, Marisa Restiffo and Clarisa Pedrotti, which has received financial support from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina) on several occasions. In 2023, he received, alongside the ethnomusicologist Rosario Haddad, the research grant “Activar patrimonio” from the National Ministry of Culture of Argentina with the project “Del campo al archivo, del archivo al campo. Escuchas comunitarias del pasado sonoro-musical Qom” [From the Field to the Archive, from the Archive to the Field. Community Listening of Qom’s Sonic-Musical Past]. During the years 2023-2024 was part of the research project “Metamorfosis de los archivos sonoros en el entorno virtual” [Metamorphosis of Sound Archives in the Virtual Environment] financed by the Argentinian National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, directed by Miguel Ángel García and Juliana Guerrero.

Since 2019, he has been part of the editorial team of the academic journal SENDAS (National University of Córdoba), which publishes articles based on final dissertations from university-level artistic programs, and he also collaborates within the academic journal El Oído Pensante (National University of Buenos Aires). As a flute player, he has performed with orchestral and chamber music ensembles, and with the wind quintet "Serendipia", he has premiered works by composers from Córdoba, Argentina.

ACUSTEME. Development of an OWL ontology for Linked Data publication of Italian and Romanian ethnographic and ethnomusicological digital archives

Summary

There are presently several digital repositories in Europe, dedicated to multimedia resources and metadata of ethnomusicological and ethnographic interest, implemented by different RDBMS technologies and catalographic standards, but without a shared normative standard. Although diversity makes up an asset – as specific digital cataloguing system fit the peculiarity of the materials and avoid too rigid standards and top-down heritagization processes – all the same, different approaches represent a problem for resources accessibility and visibility, both on a national and an international level. Digital catalogues could become an unified tool for ethnomusicological and ethnographic research if they are to be used and queried in an integrated way. Considering the history of digital archives in the Italian ethnomusicological field, and the substantial amount of already catalogued data, the enforcement of an international standard would be counter-productive and could be only carried out through a costly data conversion by each local resource centre. Current technologies allow for building a convergence of different descriptive models through Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies, bottom-up and cooperatively.

This project aims to continue the development of ACUSTEME, a computational ontology for the ethnomusicological and ethnographic domain, created by Italian scholars at UniTo, which seeks to guarantee the interoperability within different repositories from an Linked Open Data perspective. The case studies for the implementation of this research project will concern interoperability of Italian and Romanian archives. Precisely, this project will include a selected corpus from the Soundscape Museum (Riva Presso Chieri, Italy), the collection of phonographic records belonging to the Ernesto de Martino Institute (Florence, Italy), and the Folklore Archive of the West University of Timișoara (Timișoara, Romania).  

Supervisors

• Ilario Meandri (Università degli Studi di Torino)
• Otilia Hedesan (West University of Timișoara)