Digital Scholarship for the New Tinctoris Edition
David Lewis · Journal of the Alamire Foundation · 2013
A project to create a new complete digital edition of Tinctoris’s theoretical works, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents one of the most technically ambitious music theory editing projects of recent years. Multiple views of each treatise will be available, including translations and commentary, through an interactive webpage, printable documents and through open, standardized, machine-accessible formats. This article describes some of the considerations involved in planning and executing such a digital music edition, emphasizing the need to place musicologists at the centre of each step of this process. Whilst this is predominantly the role of the editors of the project, the wider community of scholars has an essential part to play, and one that is facilitated by Web technologies. To maximize the access to, and use of, the edition, technical and visual design decisions must be based on a sound understanding of the various roles users will take and the rich nature of the information sources being edited. Only through this fundamentally musicological approach to the technology can a sustainable resource be created.