This paper presents an interdisciplinary re-evaluation of the cultural and professional influence of the British violinist, musicologist, and Royal College of Music graduate Marion Scott. Drawing on feminist digital humanities and musicology, the project reassesses prevailing narratives — most notably Byron Adams’ portrayal of Scott as “a wealthy amateur” with limited historical impact — by engaging systematically with the under-examined materials preserved in the Royal College of Music’s Scott archive.

At the centre of this research is a computational humanities methodology that uses Social Network Analysis (SNA) to model and visualise Scott’s professional networks. We are developing a structured, open-access dataset of individuals, relationships, and institutional affiliations derived from archival correspondence, programmes, organisational documents, and other material traces of Scott’s creative life. Hosted on Zenodo and designed for interoperability with wider digital humanities initiatives, the dataset includes standardised node and edge attributes, temporal markers, and role-based metadata, enabling scholars to conduct reproducible analyses and integrate Scott’s networks into broader studies of twentieth-century musical labour.

Patterns of degree centrality emerging from the dataset complicate received assumptions about Scott’s marginality, instead indicating her role as a significant intermediary within early twentieth-century London’s musical and cultural life. The analysis invites a reassessment of Scott’s agency as a cultural actor and illustrates the wider capacity of Social Network Analysis to illuminate the professional ecologies of women whose contributions have been obscured in traditional historiography.

This is a hybrid event; the details will be shared upon registration.

Speaker:

Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia is a cultural historian specialising in computational humanities, with particular expertise in network analysis and feminist approaches to recovering marginalised narratives. She joined King’s College London in 2022 and is currently Lecturer in Digital Products & Industries in the Department of Digital Humanities. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at ITMO University, where she founded and led the Digital Humanities Centre. Her research combines archival scholarship with computational methods to examine cultural networks, and her current project, developed in collaboration with the Royal College of Music, maps women’s musical and creative labour in early twentieth-century London. She has delivered invited lectures and workshops internationally, including at Oxford, Princeton, NYU and Glasgow University.