The Collaborative Musical Text

Digital work in general, and the digital humanities in particular, is a highly collaborative process. The traditional model of the solitary humanist burrowing away in a library carrel in search of unique insights or perspectives is not going away anytime soon. But during the last decade in particular, the humanistic workplace has begun to resemble “big data” science and social science, with extended rings of collaborators, co-authored publications, open-source repositories of code and data, and standardized methodologies. Christa Williford, writing in a recent report for the U.S.-based Council for Library and Information Resources in Washington, DC, sees in some parts of the digital humanities a blurring of the lines that marked what C.P. Snow famously called (in 1959) “the two cultures” of academic life. Her report carries a provocative title: One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is certainly too soon to say where all of this is heading. But it is clear that scholars and librarians will increasingly be called upon to participate in such work, or might decide that the time is right to begin projects of their own. Since 2010 we have been working together on an array of digital music projects. In the course of this work we have collaborated extensively with each other, and with various scholars, students, librarians, information technology, and digital scholarship specialists in North America and Europe. Our work continues to evolve. But it seems a good moment to pause and reflect on some of the tools and methods we have used, how we have selected and refined them, and how we have managed to work in a highly distributed collaborative environment. In establishing a collaborative project, a team will need to take stock of the details, from data and metadata standards to digital platforms and repositories. Other decisions, too, will need to be made, particularly as the team sorts out workflows, navigates intellectual property concerns, and finds a balance between innovation and long-term sustainability. But perhaps more important (particularly at the outset of a project) are the intellectual and social aspects of the work ahead: how to imagine the