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Music Editing in an Online Environment: CFEO/OCVE Study Day, CCH, London, 30 October 2006

Overview

This co-sponsored Study Day focused on the relationship between conventional editing and the interpretative work that editions in an online environment support and generate. Five presentations mapped recent developments in online editing and helped to contextualise the work being carried out in Chopin's First Editions Online and affiliated projects such as the Online Chopin Variorum Edition. The event also provided an opportunity for dialogue and the exploration of collaborative potential between musicologists, humanities computing specialists, editors and music publishers.

Presentations

Discussion sessions

The discussion sessions pursued issues raised during the presentations, examining the following themes and open questions:

Archive versus edition

The key question here can be formulated as 'what does an edition really do?' If editing implies the assimilation and collation of disparate sources, supported by an element of authorial control, then an edition should be more than a mere archive of preserved data. On the other hand, the quantity and quality of information within a critical edition often bring the edition medium closer to a resource; but if this resource contains too much peripheral information then the editorial thrust may be lost.

Hypermedia and online environments provide the opportunity to navigate between these two poles, enabling users to create their own 'reading paths' through available sources. An edition in this context can thus be seen as a dynamic 'network' rather than a fixed document; nevertheless, a number of parameters need to be taken into consideration, including the reliability and suitability of available information, cost implications and accessibility issues.

Scope, cost and effort

One of the most pressing questions, especially with regard to the current funding climate, concerns the logistics of online edition projects. Are they always worth the effort and cost required? The long-term viability of a project's objectives and the usability of its deliverables may be difficult to predict when initially drafting a proposal, but the most reliable way of dealing with this problem is through scoping. Much of the preparatory work involved, e.g. in deciding which primary sources to include or in developing prototype tools, can amount to a project in itself requiring pump-priming funding from one or more bodies. Piloting can also be useful for dealing with source issues in depth before examining a larger array of sources, as in the Online Chopin Variorum Edition.

The general costs of an online edition arise from a range of elements: permissions and rights are often among the most costly aspects of a project, but otherwise the relevant costs are not significantly different from those encountered when preparing a print edition. Nowadays the preparation of an Urtext is perhaps the only viable option if a scholarly print edition is to be produced, as against the 'performer editions' which used to be but are no longer in (academic) vogue. Online edition projects, however, provide users with the ability to generate numerous new, tailormade editions from their own desktops. Although the current legal framework does not fully address all of the copyright issues associated with self-generated editions of this type, it is nevertheless possible to claim intellectual property in creations of this kind, and as a result complex problems would arise if these composite 'editions' were printed or otherwise disseminated. The irony is that works would end up being perpetually in copyright, even though the initial impetus behind online editions was to enhance freedom of access by giving users the ability to compile their own editions free of charge.

A 'tension between accessibility and authority' is also evident in this area. If a free, online resource enables users to 'create their own editions' and integrate their own comments in a dynamic edition environment, it also requires an effective system of monitoring and dealing with comments, changes and annotations. Self-policing works most effectively in popular, large-scale fora: given that only a relatively small group of scholars and music professionals might take part in a music-editing forum, the monitoring of comments along the lines of Wikipedia might prove difficult and, ultimately, unsustainable.

Market and culture

An equally important question concerns targeting the right audience and using a medium appropriate to it. This issue has two key aspects. First, for whom is this development intended, and who will get the most out of it? Second, can research cultures really be changed through these resources, and if so is such change welcome and/or necessary? Some of the most successful commercial online resources are popular with performers and music professionals who need only a basic set of tools (such as searchable databases or transcriptions-on-demand) and who have no expectations of, or inclination towards, more advanced editing facilities. If conventional reading methods are to be supplemented or even supplanted, then such an initiative should reflect practical needs, either because the primary sources in a particular domain are inaccessible, damaged or otherwise difficult to deal with, or because the online context provides an opportunity to compare and combine sources in a more efficient, rapid and/or enlightening way than traditional approaches do. The provision of online commentary, for instance, is a money-saving device from a publishing perspective. On the other hand, the ability to compare sources side-by-side is most useful when the original documents are difficult to compare physically, for example because they are held in private collections or exist in different locations around the world.

Accessibility and usability

Often the issue is not simply whether an edition or resource is useful, but whether it is situated in the right context and presented via the optimal medium. There is nowadays a tendency to go 'online for the sake of being online'; in fact, some projects might benefit more from distribution on CD-ROM. The question, however, is also one of responsibility. CD-ROMs have traditionally been seen as the responsibility of a library, whereas an online resource tends to be managed by a computing department. There is a growing need for these duties to be shared: ideally, institutions should promote a more integrated approach to the long-term sustainability of project deliverables.

Sustainability is a key consideration in general, both in terms of being able to guarantee a continuing online presence after project funding ends, and in relation to changing application standards and developments in browser technology. Furthermore, an online edition project requires continuous decision-making, for instance about whether commercial applications are more suitable to the particular needs of users than prototype, customised tools. Data representation is of course different from software technology: the former can be cutting-edge while the latter is still relatively basic, thereby ensuring wider accessibility and longer sustainability.

Research practices and funding strategies

Should we pool our efforts? And when cost is involved, what sources of funding are available and appropriate? The isolation and lack of communication between different strands of academic practice such as text- and music-editing, as well as between pigeonholed 'scholars' versus 'technicians', are frequently lamented. Whereas TEI was originally undertaken as a scholarly text-editing initiative, music-editing still suffers from the lack of suitable encoding methods that would provide a bedrock for more ambitious endeavours. (For example, the debate about the relative merits of MEI and MusicXML has not yet been resolved, nor all the issues that may arise in the symbolic representation of fine-grained manuscript notation.)

Several CCH projects, including CFEO and OCVE, were discussed as potential models in which the division of labour across a project team is flexible, and where project members have the versatility to contribute in discrete ways to complex tasks. On a larger scale, all participants noted that universities and libraries need to be able to work together, and that funding should ideally promote such collaborations. Similarly, collaborations between publishers and academic projects might prove fruitful in relevant cases.