0.14 The evia project: many challenges, some solutions  (Page 3/9)

At the conference it would be good to explore the first of these in detail, and in particular to hear how the different components of the project will be funded at one of three levels of effort and expenditure:

• Level 1 : maintaining the resource or components thereof for the long term in a stable and accessible form, with only modest additions and updates
• Level 2 : as above but with more substantial additions and updates
• Level 3 : as above but with ongoing major content addition and radical technical innovation.

As for the second point listed above, I have reached the conclusion that the approach to annotation taken in the Online Chopin Variorum Edition project (see the description in Annex 2) may provide EVIA with a useful model. First of all, there are several types of scholarly metadata in our variorum edition: “Overviews,” “Source Descriptions,” discussion of “Key Features” and detailed “Bar-level Commentary.” As noted below, the “scholarly material presented in the resource is meant to be instructive and indicative rather than fully comprehensive,” an approach which we consider to be “more consistent with the aims of the project in general, i.e., the creation of a flexible ‘dynamic edition’ produced not by a fixed body of editors but rather through an individual’s creative interaction with the constituent sources” (231). It is my belief that this sort of selectivity would work well in EVIA, even if its aims and fundamental nature are quite different from those of OCVE. Not only would the inclusion of representative rather than comprehensive annotation content provide a convenient and (in my opinion) much-needed solution to the problems of information overload, peer review, and so on alluded to above, but it would also allow more of the available funding to be channeled toward EVIA’s primary mission, namely, the preservation of video content. Having a body of “core” (i.e., annotated) materials alongside a range of other video content without annotations would of course result in structural inconsistency, but, as in OCVE, this would or at least could be purposeful rather than a weakness.

Another OCVE feature of possible relevance to the EVIA team has to do with meta-annotations, which we refer to as “personal annotations” to distinguish them from the scholarly commentary. The description in Annex 2 indicates how these are fashioned. There are several points to stress in connection with EVIA:

1. the process of applying personal annotations—whether for private or shared use—has been kept as simple as possible;
2. OCVE does not intend to police shared annotation content, both for practical reasons and in the spirit of creating open dialogue across a virtual community of users;
3. as a concomitant of the above, however, the user annotations must be strictly segregated from the scholarly commentary, the value and indeed identity of which could otherwise be compromised.

In the future, we might try to develop a “music-editing forum” (see Annex 2), and, subject to the availability of funding, EVIA’s Summer Institute model would be an excellent one to adopt in this respect. For now, however, we regard the lack of monitoring/moderation as potentially unproblematic, although an eye will be kept on the material as it evolves to determine whether or not this policy is sensible. It goes without saying that the different nature of the material within EVIA may require a different means of presenting meta-annotations, but I would encourage the project team to consider a “light touch” approach at least at a pilot stage, provided that the segregation of material I have referred to is strictly maintained.