Building Corpora of Digital Early Music Editions: Challenges and Opportunities
This webinar shows results from the CORSICA (Creation of Early Music Corpora) project. This initiative, growing from the EarlyMuse COST action, is directed by Frans Wiering (Universiteit Utrecht), with the participation of researchers from Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. The project sprang from the need to create a large corpus of early music data, coherently encoded and curated data that could be used for computer analysis, facilitating big-data studies. Hence, the research aims to improve the number of available corpora of Renaissance music by devising protocols to create collections of digital editions and, equally important, to facilitate the reuse of a sizeable number of editions produced by myriad “citizen scientists” without much systematisation.
Subtitles for this video were provided by Áine Foley.
Learning Outcomes
After watching this webinar, learners will be able to:
- Explain how the gap between the existing records of early polyphonic music and what is currently available in digital formats can limit computational musicology research.
- Understand the difference between a centralised and a human-centred approach to corpus building, and how the latter is often more practical for a field like early music.
- Identify the key barriers to interoperability across early music corpora and describe what solutions are needed to address them.
