Emendata

Laurent Pugin, in his article ‘The challenge of data in digital musicology’ states that the digital technology development depends in large part on an access and a scale of research.

The development in all disciplines in the humanities undergoes a vast change in musicology.

The reason of the fact is that the scholars in musicology base predominantly on text-based materials.

The field struggled for a long time with a limited availability of the sources, what caused an inclination of close-reading approaches.

However, the digital humanities enable to locate sources easier and at the same time give an online availability to them.

The author gives examples of some types of projects in for example: composer-specific, repertoire-oriented or library collection and describes their features and limitations.

A challenge of digital musicology projects is question of accessing large datasets that are essential while music analysis or music searching.

There are recited most popular and successful initiatives that took musicology to the next level but at the same time it is showed how much is to be done.

A next important challenge, that is claimed, is optical music recognition (OMR), because the actual tools are so imperfect that it requires very often transcriptions by hand.

While creating large datasets it is significant to consider such features as data quality or ensuring interoperability, because of the complexity and limitation that are in the field.

A the end the author outlines ways of development and opportunities that give us digital musicology projects.