Towards a hypermedia model for digital scholarly edition of musical texts based on MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) standard

Abstract

Digital scholarly editions are substantially modifying the way musical editions has been thought and conceptualized over long periods of time. It's hypermedia capabilities, and its multi-layered structure makes it possible to put in context different sources and testimonies in a virtual space where all objects are semantically related, as well as to take into account explicit distinctions about original sources, related historical information, or editorial interventions. Music digital scholarly editions embodied an interactive nature allowing users to choose from different outputs or reading paths on the bias of different purposes; namely musicological study, learning/teaching activities or performing. In this context, this Ph.D. dissertation aims to develop a theoretical model for the integration of performing variants (technical and/or expressive) that are transmitted orally or through informal channels (marks, notes or text annotations), and usually from teacher to student, within a particular stylistic or interpretive school. The new standards for encoding musical documents like MEI, allow incorporating this information as superposed layers, explicitly differentiated, to the original sources and testimonies. The proposed model is developed within the so-called social editing paradigm, which postulates the integration of some of the 2.0 Web characteristics as the collaborative production of knowledge within the academic editing processes. These new editing practices allow the integration of work's related knowledge, that circulates outside the formal editing and publication circuits, within the scholarly edition.