0.14 The evia project: many challenges, some solutions  (Page 7/9)

Alongside these sustainability challenges, EVIA faces conceptual dilemmas which potentially “will have an important impact on the continued success of the project” while also shaping its fundamental aims and objectives. These include the following:

1. Meta-annotation : Having acknowledged that the “video and accompanying scholarly annotations can be enhanced with thoughtful perspectives from other scholars, students, and the subjects of the video themselves,” the report asks: “how open can [EVIA] be and how might such a dialog be moderated?”
2. Control versus dynamism : EVIA’s emphasis on peer review and the use of persistent URLs prevent full exploitation of the dynamic capabilities of online publishing (e.g., “relatively easy updatability”). For example, ongoing changes to scholarly annotations are not practicable—a problem to which “meta-annotation functionalities are perhaps the best solution.”
3. “Inverted” archival process : The typical EVIA “scenario” has “required preservation work prior to the accessioning of the recordings and documentation into the archive,” which is the opposite of “standard media archive practice.”

The report ends by noting that EVIA’s “software platform” and “suite of services” were designed to meet “pressing needs within a core group of ethnographic disciplines,” but that these are also intended to satisfy a “wide range” of disciplinary requirements.

Annex 2:online chopin variorum edition

This description of the OCVE project has been taken from the Final Reports on both the pilot study and the first developmental work phase. Further details can be found at www.ocve.org.uk .

The first developmental phase of the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE) was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from November 2005 to September 2009. It followed on from an eighteen-month pilot study also funded by Mellon from May 2003 to October 2004. In both of these work phases OCVE’s principal aim was to facilitate and enhance comparative analyses of disparate types of musical source material, attaining a level of manipulability outstripping that manifested in extant printed editions of Chopin’s music and indeed of any composer to date. The research exploited emerging technical capacities for text/image comparison as well as recent musicological advances in cognate projects such as Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO; www.cfeo.org.uk), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from March 2004 to September 2007, and the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions . Christophe Grabowski and John Rink, Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The chief priorities of the first developmental phase (hereafter referred to as Phase 1) were to extend OCVE’s content and to build the technical tools and frameworks for the display and manipulation of that content. The end result is a new type of “dynamic edition.” Users themselves have the ability to construct a unique “edition” of their own, combining elements from the constituent source materials and consulting the scholarly apparatus that we have provided for the sake of greater insight and understanding. In addition, there are tools for adding personal annotations and thus for creating flexible, idiosyncratic “Critical Commentaries.” The emergent system is intended not only to facilitate research on musical sources but also to encourage wider modes of comparison and the reconstruction of creative histories to an extent which could not be easily achieved outside a digital environment.