Exploring information retrieval, semantic technologies and workflows for music scholarship: the Transforming Musicology project

Transforming Musicology is a three-year project undertaking musicological research exploring state-of-the-art computational methods in the areas of early modern vocal and instrumental music (mostly for lute), Wagner’s use of leitmotifs, and music as represented in the social media. An essential component of the work involves devising a semantic infrastructure which allows research data, results and methods to be published in a form that enables others to incorporate the research into their own discourse. This includes ways of capturing the processes of musicology in the form of ‘workflows’; in principle, these allow the processes to be repeated systematically using improved data, or on newly discovered sources as they emerge. A large part of the effort of Transforming Musicology (as with any digital research) is concerned with data preparation, which in the early music case described here means dealing with the outputs of optical music recognition software, which inevitably contain errors. This report describes in outline the process of correction and some of the web-based software which has been designed to make this as easy as possible for the musicologist.