Digitizing the Dualism Debate (DDD)

The “dualism debate”, a ‘hot topic’ in 19th-century German music theory, is concerned with the mutual relationship of major and minor triads, specifically whether the minor triad is a mere derivative of the major triad or whether it can be derived from first principles on its own right. This project strives to reconstruct and critically evaluate the discursive relations within this debate by using the combined power of qualitative-historical and quantitative-numerical methods and thus serve to build methodological bridges between the humanities and the sciences. The main contribution of this project consists in an empirical reconstruction of the discursive structure of the dualism debate using network and topic modeling. The project will lead to a publicly-available online resource that displays the results of the research project and provides access to the data for subsequent research.