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

635 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Digital transformations Digital technology has already transformed music. It is well over a quarter of a century since digital recordings, most prominently in the form of the CD, became established as the industry norm. The effects of this transformation are all around us today, and are reflected in a corresponding increase in research and development of digital audio within universities. Yet this has so far had little impact on the discipline of musicology, though musicologists, like everyone else, take for granted the convenience of music downloads and streaming services like Spotify or YouTube, or the easy online access to scanned scores via IMSLP and music-library OPACs. This technology and the developments that made it possible offer new opportunities for exploring new and larger musical repertories, together with the means to investigate patterns of connection and distribution that potentially could challenge the established canons of the discipline. In the Transforming Musicology project we are working towards a digital transformation of the discipline of musicology by both applying computational techniques to musicological investigations ourselves and also promoting such techniques more widely amongst the scholarly community. 1 Our approach is 'user-centric' , in that our main motivation is to advance and support musicology rather than to show off a new application for computing; but to do this we apply state-of-the-art digital technologies. In particular we investigate the possible impact of three specific kinds of technology: Music Information Retrieval; Semantic Web technologies; and network analysis. 2 This report aims to give an overview of the project's activities at the end of its second year, and some idea of what we hope to achieve. Since much of the work, especially in the area of interest to readers of Early Music, is concerned with establishing a practical infrastructure for the project, we also focus on the concept of 'workflow' as a means of capturing the processes of musicological practice, and eventually of its discourse, where semantic technologies (introduced below) play a vital role. We are doing actual musicological research that exploits technology in three contrasting topics, the first of which is of direct interest to readers of Early Music. This considers the relationship between 16th-century instrumental music, particularly lute music, …