At the MLA 2018 Annual Meeting, there was some discussion about what constitutes a digital humanities project in music. Here follow some brief remarks and loose guidelines.
In comments to the meeting minutes, Michael Cuthbert remarked that one often observes a distinction between composition (digital art) and musicology and music theory (digital humanities). Michelle Urberg draws a similar boundary in her article, ‘Pasts and Futures of Digital Humanities in Musicology: Moving Towards a “Bigger Tent”.’ Thus the theoretical/practical binary in music may have some relevance to the typical digital outputs one sees in these fields, and how we interpret them as being part of digital humanities, or not. We have decided to be a bit more catholic in our definition of music DH for a few reasons. First, our goal with this directory is to improve the findability of a wide range of digital scholarship in music. And recent scholarship in music librarianship, musicology, MIR, etc., do not appear to observe such a strict equivalence between (digital) musicology and music theory and digital humanities (see, for example, the past programs of the Music Encoding Conference, especially the theme of “encoding and performance” from 2018). Second, we feel that the boundary between projects that are research-driven, as opposed to performance-driven, is sometimes tricky to locate. While a large number of the projects currently included in our directory could be said to fall under the umbrella of musicology (both ethno- and historical), we have made a case for projects that are arguably more akin to performance (e.g. data sonification, dynamic scores, virtual reality). Our view is that the latter projects still require research.
David Day asked what distinctions we might draw between an online digital collection or library (e.g. the Danish National Digital Sheet Music Archive), a source of structured or semi-structured data (e.g. a music encoding dataset), and a project that includes some editorial apparatus, critical essays and/or similar contribution (e.g. the CHARM Mazurka Project or the Josquin Research Project). In other words, musical sources both digitized and digital, with and without scholarly contextualization. To this, one might add bibliographic and information resources, e.g. Early Music Sources and Digital Resources for Musicology, as well as syllabuses, open educational resources, and other curated lists.
We agreed that all of these work categories could potentially meet our directory criteria, but we did not aspire to comprehensiveness. For example, we have avoided large and well-known digital collections of music on the grounds that they probably don’t need the amplification. We also generally omit digital resources that are book-like in the sense that they replicate print paradigms (i.e. a PDF or collection of PDFs), as well as digital resources that primarily serve a non-musical purpose but that may include some musical sources.
In our data sheet, we have leaned towards smaller, specialized digital collections, digital editions, and other projects that hover over the general area of bibliographic and musicological studies. As we collected more projects, it became clear that categories for datasets and software were important as well. In most cases, the hybridity of music DH is evident, with some sources digitized, some born digital, some held within the physical buildings of libraries, archives and museums, and some under use restrictions or behind paywalls. Users will get a sense of this hybridity when browsing the directory.
What about this? The digital resources we use and produce to do our research. And the new forms our research, teaching, and publishing activities can take because of computers. And music. There should be a relationship to music.
While the original data sheet from 2018 asks for “Academic Field / Areas,” we have decided to suppress that column for a few reasons. First, we wanted this directory to be relatively simple to maintain, and we didn’t want to overload our contributors or our users with lots of metadata. Second, while there are separate professional societies for ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory, music librarianship, music information retrieval, and so on, we notice that these distinctions are getting fuzzier, perhaps especially so in born-digital works. We’d like to plant a flag in the soil of interdisciplinarity rather than recreate disciplinary divides. To that end, unless disciplinary keywords show up in a blurb, adherence to any given musical field won’t be so obvious.
Ouch. Way to pour salt in our wounds. Truthfully, in the space of a mere three years, we discovered that a few projects had already disappeared from the web. Rather than disappear them from our data sheet, we decided that it was important to keep them to acknowledge the fragility of digital scholarship work (including directory work!) and its concomitant sustainability issues. Books often survive through benign neglect. Digital projects are an altogether different beast. A better metaphor might be a car or a pet, something that needs to be regularly fed and shown loving care to survive. “In perpetuity” is not achievable. For a host of political, social and economic reasons, we feel it’s important to underline this point.
This directory uses a controlled vocabulary for project maturity: in development, active, archived, defunct. We used the creators’ language to make our best guess regarding the assignment of the first two categories. Archived means that there is some version of the project stored in a digital repository, trusted or otherwise, but that the main user interface has been retired. Defunct means gone from the internet (with the possible exception of the Wayback Machine).
This directory was compiled over a period of a few years by a group of our colleagues—librarians and scholars. We issued a call for collaboration via listservs and on social media networks to promote our data collection. To be sure, we’ve got our biases, but we’ve done our best to get the word out. In short, we don’t know why your project isn’t here.
The website for this directory was built as a static site by choice. It is meant to be a snapshot in time, not an ever-evolving platform. We are keeping our original Google sheet open and available to everyone. Please add your project there! There’s a column for the year a new entry was added. Make sure to use that. At future meetings of the Music Library Association, we may decide to build a new directory.