Musicology, as with most other humanities disciplines, is largely published on the web
today. This provides a new opportunity for studying the transmission of ideas, both
within and among communities of musicologists. The ideas that are formed and
transmitted within and between musicological research communities, leaving their
digital trace in online publications such as Music Theory Online, Empirical Musicology
Review, and others, may be studied as a contribution to the historiography of
scholarship. The ways in which disputes arise and are resolved or reinforced, and how
the values and interests of a research community develop and change, can be analysed
using methods from social network analytics. We have built network models based on
common institutions and co-editorship using both statistical methods and network
analytics which enable us to see the community structure within scholarly musicology.
We have also looked at where these communities do and do not follow physical and
geographic boundaries, as well as how such networks affect the spread of ideas. Using
the abstracts and keywords provided (usually by the authors themselves) to a large-
scale bibliographical resource, the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
(RILM) we present first work in a study which relates the social networks to those
which can be derived from common or related concepts explicitly expressed within this
textual material. This empirical approach goes towards a better understanding of the
ecology of scholarly musicology, across cultures, sub-disciplines, and institutions.