Music and Digital Humanities

Panel Digital Editions

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities at mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw's Department for Music Acoustics — Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw's Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

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This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

Christoph Steindl: Spotlight on Digital Editions at the Austrian National Library 

Digital scholarly editions make a significant contribution to the deeper exploration of the extensive collections of the Austrian National Library. For this reason, a core infrastructure for digital editions has been available to researchers since 2018, which is continuously further developed through the diversity of new projects. The technical implementation of these edition projects goes hand in hand with scholarly research questions. Therefore, editions at the Austrian National Library are conceived holistically and are not offered just as a service. The ability to provide an edition in a long-term and sustainable way requires intensive discussion already during project runtime; this includes, among other things, the digitization process of the edited material, consistent data modeling, as well as questions of use and interface design.

Christoph Steindl heads the Department Research and Data Services at the Austrian National Library. He is involved in the technical support and conceptual development in the field of digital humanities at the library, which includes, among other things, the sustainable infrastructure for digital editions and the ÖNB Labs.

Kateryna Schöning: An Offstage View of the E-LAUTE Project 

E-LAUTE (Electronic Linked Annotated Unified Tablature Edition) is an open-access, comprehensive, and interactive digital edition of the lute tablatures (special notation for lutes) of the German-speaking area between 1450 and 1550: Comprising roughly 2,000 pages, this vast corpus had not been investigated as a whole before E-LAUTE and was previously barely accessible to scholars, professional musicians, and the wider public alike; it had not been deciphered and had therefore been evaluated only selectively. This presentation will briefly outline the history of the project, its core conception, its current status, key findings, and the remaining 'work in progress' of this major edition. The subsequent discussion will offer a look behind the scenes, exploring both the hurdles faced and the insights gained throughout the project's lifespan. 

Kateryna Schöning, PD Dr, studied and completed her PhD in Kharkiv (Ukraine), worked 2008-2016 in Leipzig, Mannheim, and since 2016 in Vienna, where she carried out numerous research projects on music before and around 1600. She is currently a Senior Scientist at the Department of Musicology at the University of Vienna and head of the E-LAUTE project.

Iacopo Cividini: Beyond Open Access: The Digital Mozart Edition as an 'Open Edition' 

The Digital Mozart Edition (DME) aims to digitally edit the complete works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and provide them free of charge worldwide via the Internet for research, teaching, and performance. Beyond this purely technical open-access approach, the project defines itself as an "open edition" in the broadest sense: medially open through the integration of diverse source types such as libretti, letters, digital reproductions, and audio/video recordings; text-critically open through the choice between various historical versions and variants; methodologically open through the transparent presentation of editorial decisions; and performatively open through new, application-oriented tools designed for musical practice. Availability under a Creative Commons license ensures the sustainable and free reuse of all editorial data.

Iacopo Cividini, born in Bergamo in 1975, studied musicology at the Università degli Studi di Pavia and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Since 2017, he has worked on the musical text edition of the DME, initially as a research associate, and since 2023 as its team leader. His research interests include 18th- and 19th-century music editing, musical analysis, Mozart's operas, libretti, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Further infos can be found here.