The digital humanities have grown to encompass multiple disciplines; they embrace everything from online resources that have the potential to democratize scholarship to computational approaches that allow a higher order analysis of large datasets. That the digital humanities has significantly influenced musicology is evidenced by the number of leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, Journal of the Society of American Music and Nineteenth Century Music Review, that regularly review digital resources and by the increasing use of the tag ‘digital musicology’. This special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review (NCMR) and this introduction reflect a broad definition of the digital humanities; they embrace digital archives, born-digital projects, and studies employing computational methodologies and tools.

The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timing; and 3) listeners’ evaluations. These methods include a polling application, implemented on participants’ smartphones, to provide fast-turnaround feedback from orchestral musicians about their experiences of playing under different conditions; and the use of digital methods to analyse acoustical data from the individual instruments of an orchestral string section, to facilitate a quantitative analysis of orchestral togetherness. Analyses of the experiential, quantitative and listener data from a preliminary study with an orchestra of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, are presented, together with a discussion of the insights that these methods provide. The article concludes by considering the prospects of these methods for investigating nineteenth-century rehearsal and performance practices.

One of the aims of this article is to clarify and align more closely the respective priorities of researchers and practical musicians in using music notation. To that end, the first part surveys existing digital editions of music both in general and from the standpoints of different types of performer. Consideration is then given to a new ‘digital edition concept’ which might achieve more creative engagement with music on the parts of instrumentalists and singers alike. Two ostensibly conventional editions of nineteenth-century music serve as the basis of case studies that show how the notorious limitations of the printed page might be transcended more effectively and propitiously. The conclusion is that digital editions of music (DEMs) are unlikely to replace printed editions and that wholesale replacement should not be the goal in any case. Instead, in developing future DEMs for performers, the aim should be to take fuller advantage of the affordances of the digital medium so that musicians can engage with and make music all the more creatively. Only by moving conceptually beyond the stasis of ‘the material medium’ and harnessing the dynamic flux of the digital medium can the dynamic flux inherent in music itself best be captured. At the same time, it is important to recognize and respect musicians’ need for a fixed version of the score on given performance occasions, even if it is bound to be superseded thereafter.

When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

The spate of sharply critical think-pieces published over the past few years might seem to suggest that the digital humanities are in crisis, but the discipline continues to thrive: public and private funding bodies remain robustly supportive of digital humanities initiatives, laying the groundwork for research that is orientated towards the capacity for communication beyond traditional readerships. The digital humanities glow with such promise that some of us – among whom I must include myself – have quietly set aside our misgivings, instead finding ways of incorporating digital technologies and methodologies into our work. But mute complicity is not the only alternative to vocal censure, as is made clear by the many accounts of experiments and other personal experiences posted on blogs and, increasingly, published in peer-reviewed journals. Grounded in self-reflective practices, this sort of autoethnography offers a productive means of coming to terms with our complex and sometimes contradictory motivations for engaging with the digital humanities. In this essay, I reflect on a digital network visualization and analysis project I have pursued over the past five years, the final iteration of which – entitled ‘Visualizing the French Voice’ – attempted to use algorithms to make sense of the relationships between professors and pupils active at the Paris Conservatoire around the turn of the nineteenth century. I try to understand my motives at each turn, which are clearly bound up with that seductive promise of a broader readership, but also, albeit much less clearly, of ‘impact’.

The advent of digital resources, the Internet, and an interconnected globe has deeply affected the humanities and its research. Music scholars in Latin America, like everywhere else, have observed this explosion of digital information sharing, but not everyone has been able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by this technology. On the one hand, advantages of digitization are slowly becoming recognized as tools to fight the enormous size of the region (Latin America), especially through technology's ability to easily and promptly disperse sources across great distances. In addition, digitization acts as an aid in countering the endemic lack of economic resources, and more broadly offers a path towards making the academic world a more connected and equal place. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the digital revolution has not reached people across the globe equally. Digital segregation is a problem that deeply impacts numerous nations around world; and for Latin America and the Caribbean, it has meant a slower pace of incorporation into the digital era. Key databases like JSTOR and the various READEX products are still largely unavailable to scholars in Latin America, and, given the steep price of such resources, the fight for a world of open-source information is becoming increasingly political.

We are living in a great age for sheet music research. After a long period of scholarly apathy, in the last few decades the world has awoken at last to the great historical value that sheet music holds, from its topical texts, to its extraordinary illustrations. Researchers today can discover online sheet music-based exhibits on a huge variety of subjects, from the blockbuster Music for the Nation exhibits and digital collections on the Library of Congress website, which embed detailed articles and essays into curated collections of sheet music resources, to exhibits created by specialized institutions like the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which brings together songs from the North and South concerning enslaved persons, pacifists and carpetbaggers, complete with historical context and analysis. Many blogs tie sheet music illustrations in with current events: McGill's Marvin Duchow Music Library current exhibit, for instance, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France (Fig. 1), provides impressive historical context and brief essays in both English and French. Accessed entirely through the lens of sheet music, the McGill exhibit neatly demonstrates the power of the Wayback Machine that sheet music can provide us. All things ‘culture’ can be explored: the economy, religion, gender, LGBTQ issues, consumerism, elements of popular culture such as the figure of the diva, sociological topics, and so on. Sheet music is invaluable for research of all kinds, as it documents trends as they happen in a specific time and place. McGill's music library curators have harnessed just this type of documentary evidence to build an excellent exhibit. But how do researchers find the music for this kind of detailed analysis? This round-up will explore the current landscape of historical sheet music, centred around how we access it online, news about the Sheet Music Consortium (where it has been, and where it is going) and, finally, a brief listing of digitized sheet music collections which are not included in the Consortium.