Interpreting digital images beyond just the visual: crossmodal practices in medieval musicology

Journal article

The scholarly study of medieval music manuscripts has traditionally required that musicologists travel to libraries and museums where the artefacts of interest, the complete manuscript or fragments of manuscripts, are physically held. However, with the introduction of digital image archives these scholars now have the ability to conduct much of their research through both the inspection and manipulation of digital images. When digital images are used as primary research objects skillful technical work is conducted in order to draw out and expose visual information that was not previously accessible. This kind of work is conceived of as encompassing a set of scientific practices especially when manipulating, marking, categorizing and comparing features that reside within images using graphics editing software. In addition to these obvious practices where computerisation is used as a way to engage with information, we also find that medieval musicologists engage in rather non-obvious practices related to the use of technology to make sense of a physical object’s attributes as depicted within digital images that goes beyond the visual. We find that the scholars draw upon a number of different modalities to interpret what might be the tactile qualities of a manuscript’s parchment weight and texture as well as the auditory qualities represented in musical notation that denotes melody, rhythm and pitch. In this way, other sensory modalities are recovered and integrated into their visual analysis of digital images making activities around image interpretation and visual practice a broadly concerted effort involving not just a single sense but many senses. We argue that high-resolution naturalistic digital images of physical objects are oriented to in a very different manner than other visual representations such as ‘inscriptions’ which are manufactured by black-box devices in order to transform phenomena into diagrams, or ‘rendering practices’ where scientists visually transform the meaning of objects and events using representational techniques to select information and simplify its presentation. We find that medieval music scholars engage with high-resolution images of physical objects through crossmodal practices relying upon the interconnected senses to examine a variety of properties held within physical objects when they are displayed within digital images.

Authors: Eden, G; Jirotka, M; Meyer, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Maney Publishing
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 69-85
• Publication date: 2012-01-01
• Edition: Accepted Manuscript
• DOI: 10.1179/0308018812Z.0000000005
• EISSN: 1743-2790
• ISSN: 0308-0188
• Language: English
• Keywords: workplace studies; science and technology studies; digital humanities; visual culture; crossmodal practice; requirements engineering
• Subjects: 15th Century music; Software engineering; Ethnographic practices