Multimodality and Minimal Publishing. TEI, MEI, and more in 19th-Century Music Treatises

Introduction While presentation methods for the digital edition of either text or music notation can both rely on established tools for TEI or MEI presentation, digital editions that constantly alternate between modalities—e.g., in the context of music theory treatises, textbooks, music journals, composers’ correspondence, and editions of sheet music with accompanying peritexts—face significant challenges when combining the related technologies. This paper builds on a bachelor's thesis dealing with source materials from the project Digitizing the Dualism Debate (cf. Moss/Bavaud et al. 2021; Moss/Köster et al. 2021; Moss/Nápoles López et al. 2022). It also connects to the recently reactivated TEI Music SIG, which aims to harmonize and integrate music encoding with the practices of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), focusing particularly on the transitional areas between the two technological stacks. The overarching goal is to offer one or more accessible and sustainable technological solutions for publishing digital editions that include music notation. This approach is intended to support projects without institutional infrastructure for digital editions. The integration of text and music notation initially appears to be a topographical issue of text presentation. From a text encoding perspective, the problem can be addressed by integrating graphical representations of music notation as digital images. However, from a music encoding perspective, this approach is insufficient, as it prevents the formulation of relationships between text and music notation within the data (cf. Roeder/Moss/Köster 2023). Therefore, the objective is to model and encode both text and music with comparable structural and semantic depth, and to host it within a long-term sustainable environment. While the presentation could integrate scanned or vectorized music notation graphics alongside embedded MEI data, the preferred approach is to generate the presentation directly from the data without intermediate formats (while providing a fallback solution with embedded graphics if necessary). To illustrate this approach, we propose using two tools closely associated with TEI and MEI: Verovio for rendering music notation and CETEIcean, a lightweight tool for TEI processing. Both operate on JavaScript and require only a standard web server, as TEI and MEI are both processed client-wise. 1. Representation: Organizing and Modeling the Data Due to the different encoding standards, it is necessary to decide how to organize text and music notation data at the file level. To avoid potential namespace conflicts between frameworks, separating them into distinct files has proven effective. This does not necessarily mean generating one TEI file and numerous MEI files; MEI data could also be consolidated into a single file and referenced section by section using IDs. For example, a treatise with alternating text and musical examples could use a primary TEI file for the text and a single MEI file containing all musical excerpts, each tagged with unique IDs for cross-referencing. This approach reduces complexity while maintaining semantic depth. 2. Presentation: Rendering the Data Depending on the chosen data organization, the rendering process must be arranged for the browser. With the selected combination of CETEIcean and Verovio, HTML and SVG code are generated live using JavaScript. This requires precise timing: a music notation section can only be rendered by Verovio once the corresponding HTML element has been generated by CETEIcean. To achieve this synchronization, the frameworks are orchestrated via monitoring. When CETEIcean processes an XML element referencing a musical excerpt, it temporarily hands over control to Verovio to render the notation dynamically. This interplay ensures a seamless user experience without relying on pre-generated images or static files. 3. Stabilization: Hosting Environment and Citable Archiving Dynamic site digital editions are often precarious resources, as they often depend on complex server environments. Even standard solutions (e.g. with TEI Publisher) require regular maintenance, which projects and their institutions are not able to guarantee in long terms. For rendering components such as CETEIcean and Verovio, however, simple hosting solutions for static sites like GitHub Pages or any another web server are sufficient (cf. Cayless/Viglianti 2018). GitHub offers advantages such as temporal organization of data and code into release sequences. Additionally, GitHub can be linked to Zenodo, enabling the repository and its individual releases to obtain DOIs and ensuring that each release is archived independently of GitHub on Zenodo. This combination allows projects to achieve both low-cost deployment and academic curation, compliant with the endings principles (cf. The Endings Project 2023). For instance, an edition hosted on GitHub Pages could be continuously updated, while its key versions remain permanently accessible via Zenodo. Outlook The Würzburg project DigiMusTh: Aufbau einer offenen digitalen Sammlung historischer musiktheoretischer Texte aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum anhand von Beispielen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (“Development of an open digital collection of historical music theory texts from the German-speaking world based on examples from the 19th century”) will adopt this new presentation model in 2025 using the described approach. Simultaneously, this approach will serve as an example for the TEI Music SIG, showcasing its potential for other interdisciplinary projects. The next step involves modeling the dense relationships between text and music notation and integrating these into the presentation. It will also be discussed and presented how to include further rendition methods for other modalities, such as mathematical formulas in MathML or diagrams in SVG. References Cayless, H., Viglianti, R. (2018). CETEIcean: TEI in the Browser. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 21. https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.Cayless01. CETEIcean (2024). Release 1.9.0 (Jan 10), https://teic.github.io/CETEIcean. The Endings Project (2023). Endings Principles for Digital Longevity, Version 2.2.1, 2023-03-03. https://endings.uvic.ca/principles.html. Moss, F. C., Bavaud, F., Métrailler, C., Femminis, M., Köster, M. (2021). Digitizing the Dualism Debate. https://dcmlab.github.io/ddd/. Moss, F. C., Köster, M., Femminis, M., Métrailler, C., & Bavaud, F. (2021). Digitizing a 19th-Century Music Theory Debate for Computational Analysis. In M. Ehrmann, F. Karsdorp, M. Wevers, T. L. Andrews, M. Burghardt, M. Kestemont, E. Manjavacas, M. Piotrowski, & J. van Zundert (Eds.), CHR 2021: Computational Humanities Research Conference, November 17–19, 2021, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (pp. 159–170). CEUR. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2989/short_paper31.pdf. Moss, F. C., Nápoles López, N., Köster, M., & Rizo, D. (2022). Challenging sources: A new dataset for OMR of diverse 19th-century music theory examples. In J. Calvo-Zaragoza, A. Pacha, & E. Shatri (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS 2022) (pp. 4–8). https://sites.google.com/view/worms2022/proceedings. Roeder, T., Moss, F. C., Köster, M. (2023). Music-Text Interlinking as a Challenge for Digital Encodings of Music-Theoretical Writings, TEI/MEC 2023. https://teimec2023.uni-paderborn.de/contributions/124.html. Verovio (2024). Version 4.4 (Dec 17). https://www.verovio.org.