Sebastian Oliver Eck
Student Research Assistant
University of Oxford
Having completed his undergraduate studies in Musicology at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar and his MSc in Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford, Sebastian works at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – particularly recent developments in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) – archival research, and historical musicology.
His broader work focuses on developing MLLM-based workflows for semi-automatic text extraction and classification to support and augment archival research practices. His doctoral research centres on early 20th-century German music history and examines how these digital methods can meaningfully inform traditional historical enquiry.
Within the Elgar’s Themes project, Sebastian contributes work undertaken during his MSc in Digital Scholarship (supervised by Dr. Kevin Page), focusing on the application of MLLM workflows for large-scale information extraction and classification from digitised scholarly resources, e.g., the Elgar Complete Edition (ECE; 1983-).
Since October 2025, Sebastian has been continuing this line of research in his DPhil (PhD) in Music at the University of Oxford, supported by the Clarendon Fund and the Hélène La Rue Scholarship in Music (St Cross College).
More information: https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/people/sebastian-oliver-eck