title: Innovation fuels sustainability
title: how innovative elements promoted longevity in three digital humanities projects in music
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Gillaspy, Tiffany
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2023
Subjects: Arnold Schönberg Center
Digital Du Chemin
Digital Mozart Edition
Digital Projects
Information science
public abstract
Digital Humanities
Sustainability

description: Digital Humanities (DH) projects have assisted and advanced scholarship in music for decades, but the complexities of sustainability, project resilience, and ending projects gracefully are at the heart of the conversation DH scholars are having now. While innovation is often put at odds with maintenance, the incentives of funding through innovation and methods of completing a project while still expanding and developing it show potential for innovation to work in tandem with maintenance in order to sustain a project. This thesis examines the long-term development of three DH projects in music-- the Arnold Schönberg Center (ASC) website, the Digital Mozart Edition (DME), and the Ricercar projects led by Richard Freedman-- via case studies to show how innovation through new technologies, the addition of digitized materials, and approaches to audiences have been key to expanding and sustaining DH projects in music. The Arnold Schönberg Center (ASC) website, Digital Mozart Edition (DME), and Ricercar projects led by Richard Freedman have been online for 15-30 years and have multiple facets that indicate pioneering developments. The ASC website hosts and presents digitized source materials in order to increase access, garner a wider audience, clarify details, and aid the conservation of the source materials themselves. It used databases first to assist researchers and later amended them in order to better serve the public at large and aid with pedagogical goals. However, databases have been known to flatten and homogenize items into a non-linear archive, a characteristic which might be antithetical to the ASC’s mission of relaying a coherent narrative to the public about the composer’s life. The ASC also used GIS (Geographic information systems) in order to map the contents of their digital archive, giving users another method to browse items and which has the potential to better represent narrative through digital storytelling and other methodologies used in Spatial Humanities work. The DME also had databases to assist researchers and digitized source materials with accessibility and conservation advantages, but is primarily the host of critical editions of Mozart’s music. This is first seen with the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA) Online, which is a digital publication of a print resource that increases accessibility, allows for a wider audience, and has the potential for greater flexibility. Additionally, development of the new Digital Interactive Mozart Edition (DIME), which uses the Music Encoding Initiative standards to create even more flexibility and dynamic elements for users, is underway. The three Ricercar projects led by Richard Freedman include “Les Livres De Chansons Nouvelles De Nicholas Duchemin,” The Lost Voices Project, and Citations: the Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM). The earliest project, “Du Chemin” features digitized source material and digital publications as well as a process that once allowed users to make their own modifications to the provided musical editions. The Lost Voices Project utilizes a database which serves as a treatise on the 16th-century chanson that allows for the reconstruction of music through crowdsourcing. The emphasis on collaboration extends beyond the users contributing to the project into open-source technology that was supported and valued. Finally, CRIM, while scaffolding on developments made in the earlier projects, included novel approaches to Linked Open Data standards by using nanopublications, while also highlighting some limitations to crowdsourcing and reliance on grants to do digital work.
description: Some of the strategies in project development were shared across all three case studies (Digitized Source Material) and others were seen in two of the three (Database of Sources, Pedagogical approaches, and the use of the Music Encoding Initiative). All of these shared developments are also recognizable in other long-term digital projects in music and, along with confirmed and potential future developments of the three case studies, suggest that innovation is not the enemy of maintenance but a strategic device by which sustainability can be achieved.