SCHOLARLY EDITIONS AND THE DIGITAL AGE: TEXT AND MUSIC

An interdisciplinary workshop jointly organized by the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature and the Medieval Studies Institute of Indiana University

Indiana Memorial Union, Oak Room
Friday 31 August 2012, followed by a Study Day on Saturday 1 September

Digital editions have already begun to drastically change the work of scholars, but many questions of method, technology, academic recognition, remain open. This workshop will draw together scholars from a variety of fields to present and discuss their diverse experiences in digital scholarly publication, and aims to answer such questions as the following: what are the advantages of a digital edition, compared with a traditional one? How difficult is to create a digital edition today, and what type of collaboration between different scholars does it entail? Are the standard techniques used by scholars sufficient/suitable for all purposes? How are different fields (Literature, History, Music, etc.) benefiting or not benefiting from the possibilities of this new medium? Finally: are electronic editions advanced enough, and well-regarded enough by scholars and institutions to suggest that the age of printed editions is coming to an end?

The workshop will have a special, albeit not exclusive, focus on medieval and Early modern themes and materials. Some technical aspects will be illustrated, but the presentations will concentrate on general methodological approaches. On the following morning, Saturday 1 October, a more informal all-musicological Study Day will be held, organized by CHMTL. This is an opportunity to present and discuss new initiatives stemming from the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (the oldest of the projects hosted by CHMTL) followed by other presentations/responses and an open discussion/question time on digital applications to music studies.

Speakers:
Benjamin Albritton  (Stanford University)
Donald Byrd (IU, School of Informatics and School of Music)
Michelle Dalmau (IU, Digital Library Program)
Giuliano Di Bacco (IU, CHMTL)
Richard Freedman (Haverford College)
James Ginther  (Saint Louis University)
Clara Henderson (IU, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities)
William Newman  (IU, History and Philosophy of Science)
Dot Porter (IU, Digital Library Program)
Perry Roland (University of Virginia)
Martha Nell Smith (University of Maryland)
H. Wayne Storey (IU, French and Italian)
John Walsh (IU, Library and Information Science)

The capacity of the venue is limited. Please register by emailing the dedicated address iuchmtl@gmail.com by 28 August. Please let us know if you plan to attend the panels of the Friday morning/afternoon and/or of the Saturday, and whether you can join us for lunch on Friday in the Tudor Room ($12). For more information, email gdibacco@indiana.edu.

Download the Schedule here (PDF)

•

The Workshop has been made possible thanks to a Workshop/Small Conference Grant of the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study

•

CHMTL and MEST are delighted to welcome five guest speakers: 

Benjamin Albritton holds a PhD in medieval musicology, with a focus on the interplay of word and music in the fourteenth century. A Machaut specialist, his latest contribution is an essay in the Companion to Guillaume de Machaut (forthcoming by Brill). He has been a member of the board of directors of the International Machaut Society. As a digital humanities and manuscript studies scholar, he works as Digital products and services manager at Stanford University Library, where he is primarily responsible for a portfolio of projects on interoperability and the support of scholarly uses of medieval materials.

James R. Ginther is Professor of Medieval Theology and Director of the Center for Digital Theology at Saint Louis University. Ginther has been active in digital humanities for almost fifteen years and has developed searchable textbases, 3DRT models of historic sites of religious value and a digital edition of a medieval text.  His current project is T-PEN, a web-based tool that supports the transcription of unpublished manuscripts that have been digitized.  Born and raised in Toronto, Ginther gained his doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto. He taught at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom before coming to Saint Louis in 2002.

Richard Freedman is John C. Whitehead Professor of Music at Haverford College.  His research on French and Italian music of the sixteenth century has appeared in major musicological journals and in his book, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France (2001). He has just completed a new cultural history of Renaissance music for W. W. Norton.  His digital project on the chanson albums of Nicolas du Chemin combines his interests in the Renaissance chansons with some new tools for the study of musical texts, including an image archive, modern critical editions, reconstructions, and tools for collaborative research.

Perry Roland is Music Metadata Librarian at the University of Virginia Music Library where he participates in the creation of new digital resources and their metadata.  Perry holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Music Education from Concord College, Athens, West Virginia; a Master of Arts degree in Music Composition from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and a Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  Perry is the principal architect of the Music Encoding Initiative, a project aimed at creating a music notation model and tools for the musicological community.

Martha Nell Smith is professor of English in the University of Maryland. Far ahead of the curve on the possibilities of digitally-born critical inquiries, professor Smith has been leading the way toward a new age of textual scholarship and is considered a luminary in the world of digital humanities. An expert on the writings of Emily and Susan Dickinson, she begun the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1997; in 1999 she founded the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Her latest contribution to digital scholarship is Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (University of Virginia Rotunda Press, 2008).

CHMTL is pleased to announce the opening of a position of Web/Database Analyst in the Jacobs School of Music. The position will be initially as one-year appointment and the successful candidate will work half-time as CHMTL’s Digital Projects Manager (half-time as programmer for the Jacobs School of Music Information Technology Systems). More details on Jobs@IU.

CHMTL has been awarded a New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant, the major research grant program funded by Indiana University. The grant will allow us to begin a pilot project of new online editions and publications on the history of music theory.

The Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University has awarded CHMTL funds for the organization of a Workshop on “Textual and Musical Editing in the Digital Age,” to be held at the end of the summer of 2012. The workshop will be organized in collaboration with the Medieval Studies Institute.

CHMTL announces its participation in a new collaborative project, “Musical Collectorship in Italy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” proposed by professors Giovanni Zanovello and Massimo Ossi of the Musicology Department. This jump-start project will investigate a rich collection of manuscripts and early prints gathered by the music collector Giuseppe Greggiati, housed in the Italian city of Ostiglia. Initial support will be provided by Collaborative Research and Creative Activity Funding, through the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

We are pleased to announce that Giuliano Di Bacco will be assuming the directorship of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature. Most recently from Cambridge, England, Giuliano Di Bacco is a medievalist working on polyphonic repertories and treatises of music theory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy and France. His research deals with manuscripts and textual criticism, archival studies, and biographies, especially focusing on the musical chapels of the popes of the Great Schism, and the Ars nova in Italy and France. In 2009 Thomas Mathiesen, founder of the Center, stepped down as Director and was followed by Interim Director Peter Slemon, formerly CHMTL’s Associate Director.