Whether facsimiles of manuscripts, scholarly editions for critical study, or scores intended for use by performers, editions of musical works are familiar print sources. In the DH sphere, digital editions meet one or more of these needs, while making more transparent both the process of composition and the editorial choices that led to a final product. Some projects involve relatively simple facsimile presentations of source material, using scanned scores and standards like IIIF. Others, like the Digital Interactive Mozart Edition, make use of schemas like MEI and TEI to encode music notation and texts, resulting in scores that can be rendered in multiple viewers and used for further analyses. Many, like Measuring Polyphony, permit researchers to compare their edited MEI versions with digital facsimiles of the source materials. Projects like Beethovens Werkstatt use the expansive possibilities of musical encoding to trace the history of complex, multi-source musical works. Finally, by combining music notation with audio and video recordings, projects like Sounding Tennyson return the experience of sound and performance to the study of musical sources. Areas of active research in the field include methods of representing musical notations beyond common practice Western tonal music, ways to make use of MEI-encoded scores for analysis, and opportunities to incorporate community contributions like annotations.
In no particular order…