Musicology of Early Music with Europeana Tools and Services

The Europeana repository hosts large collections of digitized music manuscripts and prints. This paper investigates how tools and services for this repository can enable Early Music musicologists to carry out their research in a more effective or efficient way, or to carry out research that is impossible to do without such tools or services. We report on the methodology, user-centered development of a suite of tools that we have integrated loosely, in order to experiment with this specific target audience and an evaluation of the impact that such tools may have on how these musicologists carry out their research. Positive feedback relates to the automation of data sharing between the loosely coupled tools and support for an integrated workflow. Participants in this study wanted to have the ability to work not only with individual items, but also with collections of such items. The use of search facets to filter, and visualization around time and place were positively evaluated, as was the use of Optical Music Recognition and computer-supported analysis of music scores. The musicologists were not convinced of the value of activity streams. They also wanted a less strictly linear organization of their workflow and the ability to not only consume items from the repository, but to also push their research results back into the Europeana repository. 1.! INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND The basic aim of the work presented in this paper is to develop services and tools that leverage content in the Europeana Cloud for researchers in digital humanities [4]. In a first year of experimentation, we focused on content in the Wittgenstein archives at the University of Bergen and the Axiom philosophy group at the VU University Amsterdam [5]. In this paper, we report on experimentation in a second year of the project, where we targeted a research community of musicologists that focus on Early Music. It is important to note that the Europeana Cloud project has a much wider scope: it is concerned with migrating the backend technology of Europeana to a cloudbased infrastructure. The focus of our work is to demonstrate that this technical development enables new tools and services that make it possible for researchers in digital humanities (in the specific case of the work presented in this paper: researchers in Early Music) to either carry out their existing research in a more effective or efficient way, or to carry out research work that is impossible without such tools and services, at least in practical terms, for instance because it would involve too much manual tedious human labor. In the early phase of the project, as the cloud-based services are still under development, we investigate this issue of added value by loosely integrating existing tools and services accessing the original Europeana services and other suitable services, and by imitating the workflow of the Europeana research platform, which is still under development. 2.! RESEARCH GOAL AND METHODOLOGY 2.1! Research questions In this paper, we address the following research questions: 1.! What are the main problems for digital musicologists whose research focuses on Early Music? 2.! How can we address these problems and demonstrate the potential added value of cloud-based tools and services on top of large repositories of content like Europeana for Early Music musicologists?