Early music and Web 2.0

Journal article

Having a public-facing website is de rigueur for scholarly projects these days, even if they are not primarily online projects, and everyone knows that the web is a wonderful source of information. One can name—and readily find via a search engine such as Google—plenty of online resources for early music.1 Many of these, however, essentially replicate more traditional library holdings with the added benefit of being remotely accessible and searchable (although search functions vary widely in power and reliability). This short article is not about these ‘flat’ kinds of data but is designed to sing the praises of the sort of interactive sites available since the advent of what is generally termed ‘web 2.0’: blogs, social networking sites, wikis (i.e. crowd-sourced information), and folksonomy (essentially crowd-sourced indexing of content).2 The difference with web 2.0 resources is that content is not merely consulted by the reader, but is partly created by the ‘reader’ (a ‘prosumer’ rather than a consumer, in the lingo) and shared with other users. This is a key difference, and one particularly valuable to scholars of early music, who are often working in institutions over-run by people working on much later music and who might rarely get the chance, in these times straitened by institutional funding cuts to conference travel budgets, to network in person. While relevant websites, databases and ‘flatter’ online resources are very occasionally reviewed in the traditional organs of scholarly publications, I have yet to see a journal reviewing the wonders of web 2.0-type offerings.3 Clearly a 1200-word article is not the place to do a full survey of what is out there, so this short introduction is an entirely personal selection of three things that are, or can be made, more closely geared to early music. While the most familiar example of a web 2.0 interface for most readers is probably Facebook, I am no longer a user (I was an early adopter and found it too intrusive, although I hear its privacy settings are now better than in 2005). Facebook does not therefore feature in what follows, although it undoubtedly has many groups relevant for early music.

Authors: Leach, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Early Music
• Volume: 41
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 134-135
• Publication date: 2013-02-01
• DOI: 10.1093/em/cas148
• EISSN: 1741-7260
• ISSN: 0306-1078
• Language: English