Music Scholarship Online (MuSO): a research environment for a more democratic digital musicology

Abstract

This paper describes the work to date on Music Scholarship Online (MuSO), an online research environment for digitized and born digital music resources that inscribes itself within the federated model of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC). With the project now in its third year, MuSO has reached an inflection point where it has developed a musiccentered RDF schema and demonstrated the potential for federated searching across ARC nodes by crosswalking eighteenth-century music content from Europeana into ARC. The case study presented here outlines the dissemination role that MuSO proposes to play within the music research community, the history of MuSO in relation to ARC, the Europeana test case, and future steps for the continued development of MuSO. By facilitating the discovery of digital music content, and providing a virtual environment for music researchers, MuSO will promote data reuse, strengthen community standards in music representation, and create possibilities for cross-disciplinary exchange. We propose that by leveraging the connections between digital music resources and digital humanities research technologies, MuSO will facilitate new research that expands the musicological discipline.