Toward a community model of scholarly editing: FAIR/CARE, research ethics, & labour visibility

Abstract

Historically, scholarly editions of music have identified a managing editor and individual volume editors. Other contributors might receive an acknowledgement with a vague description of activities, with institutional support often appearing in the printed metadata. This model’s emphasis on single scholars perpetuates a myth, relying heretofore upon predominantly invisible labour. Digital editions require interdisciplinary collaboration combining musicological skills, technical skills, and infrastructural resources, thus challenging this model’s ability to endure. Moreover, digital editions proffer opportunities for reconsidering the roles, workflows, and knowledge structures involved in critical musical scholarship.

Situated at the intersection of currently running and recently completed digital projects, continuously emergent tools, sociology, and philosophy, this essay reflects on the role of the editor in the digital age. Beginning with Howard Becker’s art worlds model of creative communities, it suggests a model based on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). MEI affords expansive metadata recording for contributors – composers, librettists, performers, editors, researchers, funders, etc. – to a work and its embodiments, which in turn enables broader visibility and empowers greater acknowledgement of the labour involved in such projects. Alongside other digital projects, this essay pays particular attention to how these technological and team-focused concepts are at- and in-play in the Reger-Werkausgabe Online.

KEYWORDS:

• Metadata
• labour visibility
• normative ethics
• digital catalogue
• data governance

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• Databases
• distribution
• interfaces
• history
• social aspects
• software

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The authors wish to thank the editor, peer reviewers, and editorial staff of the Journal of New Music Research for their assistance in bringing this article to print.

1 In no way are the assessments of the modes of operation in this essay intended to be castigations or condemnations of individual persons or projects. Rather, they exist to establish a status quo as the context from which digital edition making has emerged, and thus the past with which it must contend.

2 These changes will be addressed in the research project ‘MerMEIding to the future – A community driven sustainability approach for high quality metadata within digital musicology’ (project number 528785591), recently approved by the German Research Foundation and starting in early 2024.

3 For a complete list of current as well as former project team members and their respective contributions and responsibilities, see www.reger-werkausgabe.de/team.html. Furthermore, RWA depends on support and advice from a wider group of external institutions and individuals. For these mentions and their contributions, see https://www.reger-werkausgabe.de/acknowledgement.html)

4 See the Reger-Werkausgabe’s entire list of published edition volumes and single issues at https://www.reger-werkausgabe.de/publications.html.

5 At the beginning of the project, it was intended that the technical part of labour should have mainly been executed by externally consulted and trained student assistants. The idea was to achieve equally streamlined digital workflows in a relatively short amount of time, as it had been the case with printed publications for decades. It quickly became clear, however, that this could not be achieved, so the funder managed to elevate and set up the position of the ‘Verbundstelle Musikedition’ = ‘Federated assistant for music edition,’ initially shared between RWA and the then second hybrid music edition project within the Academies’ Program, ‘OPERA – Spectrum of European Music Theater in Individual Editions’ (OPERA, 2023).

6 The authors fully acknowledge the disconnect between calling for open science in the text of this article the traditional (i.e. - paid subscription) mode of its publication. The cost to publish Open Access is prohibitive, even punitive for authors (c. €2800 for this article). Given the options for definite publication in this particular venue or the uncertainties of publishing elsewhere, the authors accept that present reality is not in line with the vision for democratising access presented herein. As such, they publish here in protest of the current operational model for this or any journal that seeks to force authors to pay for the fully democratised access to scholarship.