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Article contents
Music DH 2021: A Directory of Digital Scholarship in Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2023
Abstract
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- Type
- Digital Resource Review
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 20 , Special Issue 2: Tsarist Russia and the Musical World Nineteenth-Century Salonmusik , August 2023 , pp. 457 - 467
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 The Sources page is https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/reuse/. Unless otherwise stated, all web pages in this review were accessed 27 December 2022.
2 The list of digital platforms includes, for example, Digital Resources for Musicology (DRM) https://drm.ccarh.org/; the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) project page https://music-encoding.org/community/projects-users.html; and Reviews in Digital Humanities https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/musicology. Few articles on digital humanities scholarship in music have been published, but they cited my short history of music and digital humanities: Urberg, Michelle, ‘Pasts and Futures of Digital Humanities in Musicology: Moving Towards a “Bigger Tent”’, Music Reference Services Quarterly 20/3–4 (2017): 134–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, a number of librarians maintain library guides of digital scholarship that influenced the Music DH directory: the Harvard Music Library's Pinboard by Kerry Masteller https://pinboard.in/u:HarvardMusicLib; and the Digital Musicology Guides by Corinne Forstot-Burke https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/mus381/digitalmusicology and by Liz Crisenbery https://guides.library.duke.edu/c.php?g=857511. For the full list of resources see https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/reuse/.
3 Only the DRM catalogues more resources, but its entries lack rich metadata and it does not include software tools or laboratories, which are two important and growing areas of digital scholarship.
4 For reference the four resources are the A-R Music Anthology, https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh062/, Ravi Shankar Collection at CCNY, https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh148/, the Hatch-Billops Oral History at CCNY https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh149/, and the Sonic Glossary https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh083/.
5 I point out the focus on scholarly projects because it contrasts with those that are intentionally created as publicly engaged scholarship. There is a growing divide in the digital humanities community between projects directed at the public and those directed at scholars. The DH Awards, established in 2012, have always included a category for public audiences and in more recent years that category has become DH for Public Engagement (see http://dhawards.org/). Arguably all openly available digital scholarship can be engaging for the public, but publicly engaged humanities projects are characterized by their collaboration between scholars and community members in the production and maintenance of digital projects. By comparison, scholarly digital projects primarily engage scholarly communities of practice.
6 The DH Awards for 2018 (http://dhawards.org/dhawards2018/results/), 2019 (http://dhawards.org/dhawards2019/results/), and 2020 (http://dhawards.org/dhawards2020/results/) each cited more than ten projects in the best DH Tool or Suite of Tools. In 2021, the number of tools dropped precipitously, which may be a reflection of scholarly fatigue after the stress of the COVID pandemic during 2020 (http://dhawards.org/dhawards2021/results/). It remains to be seen whether that number rebounds in 2022.
7 Music DH FAQ, https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/faq/.
8 Richard Strauss: Works. Critical Edition – Online Platform, https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh021/ (accessed 7 January 2023); Website: http://www.richard-strauss-ausgabe.de/ (accessed 7 January 2023).
9 Broadside Ballads Online, https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh052/.
11 My search also returned a third result, the REFRAIN index, a collection of thirteenth-century refrains, the scholarly study of which began in the nineteenth century, but not relevant to my inquiry into digital projects about nineteenth-century music.
12 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh200/; Website: https://dstrykowski.shinyapps.io/pricesofmusic/.
13 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh058/; Website: https://corpus-musicae-ottomanicae.de/content/index.xml.
14 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh096/; Website: https://archive.org/details/byuinternationalharparchive.
15 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh100/; Website: https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/UNTML/browse/?fq=dc_type:image_score (accessed 7 January 2023).
16 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh202/; Website: https://en.coleccionistasdesonidos.com/.
17 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh025/; Website: https://beethovens-werkstatt.de/ and see also: https://music-encoding.org/projects/beethoven.html and on Edirom: https://music-encoding.org/projects/edirom.html.
18 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh101/; Website: https://grfia.dlsi.ua.es/hispamus/.
19 The software on which Music DH is built is Minicomp/Wax (Minicomp stands for minimal computing), a framework that helps project groups without much software engineering background or with minimal human capital to launch a digital exhibition website. This framework has a number of advantages, and I can see why the Music DH team selected it. Wax can process the CSV file of the directory metadata quickly and easily, meaning project teams have less overall overhead to keep information maintained (as long as they can keep their CSV data file updated). The tools built into Minicomp/Wax helped the Music DH team process image data (specifically, a screenshot of each catalogue item) and assign metadata to those images in a standard way. The freestanding CSV file also has the advantage of being easily transportable by end-users who prefer to engage with Music DH as a spreadsheet instead of a website. For metadata professionals and others hoping to link to Music DH records, this portability is also important because it adheres to the FAIR principles of metadata (www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/), which are Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse. Finally, the Minicomp/Wax framework is a relatively easy lift for setting up, deploying, and maintaining the directory. If you are a scholar interested in launching your own exhibit of musical or other items, this could be a fairly easy way for you to set up a website to display your work.
20 PIDs are one of the key elements to making scholarship findable today. Scholars can sign up for an individual PID, the ORCiD (https://orcid.org/), to identify all of their published work in one record. Research institutions are assigned RORs (https://ror.org/), which in conjunction with ORCiDs can link scholars to a university or other research organization.
21 One field that was not included in the website records is the field recording whether a project is open access or not. An item-access statement has been manually added outside of the metadata block coming from the CSV to each of the four records with restricted content (in the website html it is denoted as <p class=“item-access”>[Access is limited, restricted or paywalled]</p>). An open access field is included in the CSV that can be downloaded with the record content. At present only four projects are licensed, but if this project continues to include more paywalled content, it will be useful for end-users to search on whether a project is freely available.
22 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh189/; WayBack Machine harvest: https://web.archive.org/web/20210806074043/http://songsofthevictorians.com/.
23 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh190/; WayBack Machine harvest: https://web.archive.org/web/20210728132729/http://augmentednotes.com/.
24 Music DH record: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/musicdh/mdh024/; Alexander Street's archive page: https://alexanderstreet.com/oml.
25 Music DH, FAQ: https://rutgersdh.github.io/musicdh/faq/.
26 The only larger directory of digital projects that I know of is the National Humanities Alliance Humanities for All collection, which indexes over 2,000 public humanities projects. Most of those projects are not focused on musical topics (https://humanitiesforall.org/).