Accessing medieval music: from material codex to digital specimen

Conference item

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 scholars now have the ability to conduct much of their research through both the inspection and manipulation of digital images. We argue that increasingly digital image use in the humanities is extending beyond the description of visual images through the analysis of aesthetics and culture (e.g. art history and media studies) towards their respecification as research objects where ‘technical work’ is conducted in order to draw out and expose information that wasn’t accessible before. We are finding that work conceived of as traditionally ‘scientific’ kinds of practices are nonetheless being adopted by humanities scholars especially in their use of digital image analysis software tools to manipulate, mark, categorize and compare features that reside within such images (Terras, 2006; de la Flor et al, 2010). The increased use of computational technologies within the humanities is transforming research processes and knowledge production amongst these scholars and so provides us with an opportunity to investigate beyond the sciences across a wider swath of academic disciplines.

Authors: de la Flor, G; Jirotka, M; Meyer, E

• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Host title: Visualisation in the age of computerisation, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 25-26 March 2011
• Edition: Author's Original
• Language: English
• Keywords: requirements engineering; workplace studies; computer-supported cooperative work
• Subjects: Technology and Applied Sciences; Social Sciences; 15th Century music