Digital annotation can do more than capture marginal notes on digital materials; it can also document the process and results of scholarly activity. When annotations follow a uniform structure, that work becomes findable and shareable across applications and platforms, enabling an all-digital research workflow.
To support this workflow, developers have been investigating methods to select and assemble musical examples that can be used to substantiate research claims. This is generally done through digital annotation, which at its core attaches information (the Body) to another digital resource (the Target). In a music studies context, the target is often an excerpt from an encoded score or a clip from a digital recording. The Music Annotation Ontology (MAO) was developed to structure these musical segments for annotation, while carefully distinguishing between different versions, variations, repetitions, and recordings. However, using these musical structures—in various media and at different levels of abstraction—required practical guidelines to ensure their affordances were properly taken advantage of. This NFDI4Culture grant was designed to provide those guidelines, while also improving the ability of the ontology to represent different types of scholarly activity. This project benefited from the implementation of the MAO model on several digital musicology projects. Conversations with the developers on those projects led to insights that helped guide the revision process.
The revision focused on schematizing the components of scholarly commentary. Many musicological statements are three-part entities consisting of a textual assertion, the musical object (or objects) it addresses, and the evidence supporting the claim. The central challenge was to encode the relationships among these parts within the annotation. Commentary is not only directed at a specific musical passage; it often also refers to the work as a whole and to the distinct—yet integral—evidence for the claim. Special attention was given to modeling this composite target, since each component stands in a different relationship to the editorial statement. In addition, the ontology was revised so it could break down text descriptions into independent, fact-based statements about the data, allowing access to musical content with a greater degree of granularity. The project underscored the importance of gathering real use cases from active projects. Developers can anticipate needs only to a point; unanticipated requirements and consequences surface through actual practice.
Later this year, the updated ontology will be introduced to the music encoding community for feedback with the aim of publishing version 2.0 by early fall. With these refinements, the MAO enhances the shareability and verification of digital research: commentary can circulate across applications alongside its sources, and evidence can be easily accessed, inspected, and reused. The result is a more systematic framework for creating, sharing, and validating scholarly commentary in digital musicology.
Mark Saccomano