Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.
Born 1983 Benjamin finished his studies in musicology in 2008 with his M.A. thesis on “Combinatorics as method of composition. Studies on Francesco Saverio Geminiani’s ›Guida Armonica o Dizionario Armonico‹“, including a digital edition of the treatise. His affiliation to MEI started with his work at the Edirom project at Detmold in 2009 and has continued ever since in several other research context. While in 2016 Benjamin started as editor with the Bernd Alois Zimmermann-Gesamtausgabe and today he is filling the position of a Research Software Engineer for the project. The insights gained as editor help him identifying community and user needs for his tool development, e.g. the oXygen-MEI-addon or build processes of schemata and data packages for digital editions.
From the beginning of my professional career MEI has been a central aspect of my day-to-day work. Seeing it implemented as backbone of the Edirom software was only the beginning of a worthwhile engagement with both the format, and the emerging community. I was fascinated by the fact that working with MEI meant working with music professionals from all around the world. Seeing all the effort done to bring together such things as critical edition, historical notation, or music analysis in a single format on the sole basis of shared interest was the spirit that fuelled my commitment to MEI.
As Board member I would love to care preserving and spreading this spirit by:
Although these general issues might not promote new features in MEI’s encoding guidelines, I see them as central aspect of MEI’s success. Nevertheless I welcome technical advance and developments in the cosmos of MEI and would love to help anybody to get the most from and for the community by complying with the above aspects.
Elsa De Luca is an early music palaeographer based at CESEM – FCSH NOVA University of Lisbon since 10/2016. This appointment follows two previous postdoctoral fellowships at CESEM (05/2011–04/2013) and at the University of Bristol (05/2013–08/2016). Currently, Elsa is Coordinator of the Portuguese Early Music Database; co-director of the book series Musicalia Antiquitatis & Medii Aevi, published by Brepols; and she served as Administrative Chair (2020–21) and member of the Board of the *Music Encoding Initiative *(2019–21). Elsa is also a board member of the Centre d'Études de Paléographie Musicale (CEPM), and she had a crucial role during the first stage of the Cantus Index, a research tool that integrates eleven international chant databases and permits searches for the chants for the mass and office.
Elsa holds a PhD in Historical Musicology (Università del Salento, 2011) and a Piano Diploma (2002). Her research on notations in Iberian and French manuscripts (10th – 16th cent.) and Visigothic musical cryptography led to publications in major journals (Early Music History, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, MusikTheorie, Revue de Musicologie, CSIC Anuario de Estudios Medievales etc.). Elsa has collaborated in research projects in Italy, France, Portugal, the UK, and Canada.
I am honoured to be nominated as a candidate in the elections for the MEI Board. I was introduced to MEI by my colleagues in the SIMSSA project at McGill University and felt immediately enthusiastic about it. Subsequently, I presented papers at MEC (2016, 2019), I contributed to the development of the MEI Neumes Module (4.0) and the Guidelines (Ch. 6), and I co-authored an article on capturing early notations in MEI. I co-edited the MEC Proceedings 2020, and I was recently nominated Team Lead for the "MEI and DACT" working group. I served as MEI Board member (2019-21) and as Administrative Chair (2020–21). I would very much welcome the opportunity to contribute further to the vision and mission of MEI with my expertise as a music palaeographer. The study of different styles of early notations has equipped me with a deep understanding of the methodological challenge of converting music into a machine-readable format that allows analysis and accurate information retrieval. I am currently testing the interoperability of the Neumes module to non-Western European early notations. I also aim to promote MEI-related activities (workshops, articles, conferences, etc.) among historical musicologists to bring more varied expertise to the MEI community.
I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Library and Information Science and Musicology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2020 with a thesis on research design and data practices in peer reviewed musicological publications. Since October 2019, I have been complementing these studies in the consecutive Master’s programme in Information Science at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. During my undergraduate studies, I worked with TEI and MEI in the context of a digital letter edition of Ferruccio Busoni. Within the MEI community, I am a permanent member of the MEI Metadata and Cataloging Interest Group.
I feel truly honoured to have been nominated to stand as a candidate for the MEI Board election. Since I first came into contact with the MEI community, I have always encountered it as very welcoming and inclusive to all its members – be it novice or long-term members. I appreciate the diverse (professional) backgrounds of all the people involved in the community and the open-minded discussion and working environment that the community provides. If I was to be elected as a Board member, I would be delighted to share my personal expertise in the fields of musicology and information science to support the aims of the community in any way I can.
Anna E. Kijas is the Head of Lilly Music Library at Tufts University. She is responsible for managing the library, collection development, and supporting the pedagogical and research needs of students and faculty in the music department. Her academic training includes master’s degrees in library and information science from Simmons College, music with a concentration in musicology from Tufts University, as well as a bachelor of arts in music literature and performance from Northeastern University.
Through musicology and libraries she became involved with digital humanities, exploring and pursuing ways in which computational methods and tools can augment scholarship and publishing. Anna has a vested interest in pedagogical approaches and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical research, and in the use of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access research and publishing. She is also interested in supporting sustainable ways of developing digital projects through the use of minimal computing.
Anna is the co-administrator of the MEI Pedagogy Interest Group and is developing an open-access music incipit encoding project, Rebalancing the Music Canon that focuses on making works by un(der)-represented people more discoverable, decentering the musical canon, and making data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive.
If elected to serve on the MEI Board, I would bring a unique perspective based on my experiences as both a scholar and librarian who is interested in pushing the boundaries of musicology (and humanities, in general) not only through the application of computational methods, but also by considering issues around diversity, accessibility, and sustainability in the data we create or curate, the research we do, and the projects we develop.
I would advocate for an inclusive and praxis-focused approach to the ongoing development of MEI. Additionally, I am interested in facilitating ways in which the MEI community can continue to grow and support an inclusive and diverse membership, especially by fostering and supporting emerging or early-career scholars and students.
My full resume is available at https://www.annakijas.com/assets/pdf/2022-Kijas_CV.pdf.
I am a researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and a lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. Since completing my training as a historical musicologist I have worked as a researcher on a range of digital musicology projects, which have included novel ways of publishing musical scholarship (e.g. the Lohengrin TimeMachine), corpus building (e.g. the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music), digital scholarly editions of music treatises (e.g. ‘Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works’) and works catalogues (‘Delius Catalogue of Works’, using MerMEId). MEI has become an increasingly large component in all of these research strands. I have taught on both music and computing degree programmes, and helped design and deliver the Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. I participate in many of the MEI interest groups, and am co-convener of the tablature IG.
MEI has established itself as the most effective model for scholars working with music notation. As the size and diversity of our user base increases, we need to ensure that we remain welcoming, flexible and approachable as a community. I am encouraged by the ongoing work on improving the guidelines and example encodings, gathering and sharing pedagogic practices, and looking carefully at how our core model holds up to the widest possible range of musics, notations and users. If elected I would look to supporting these core activities to ensure sustainable and fair growth for the community. When Covid threats begin to recede, I would also be keen to find ways to widen MEC’s recruitment, recognising its position now as both a community event and an important annual recruitment and training opportunity.
Soon after graduating in Musicology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universtät Mainz, I discovered the research field of Digital Humanities and Music Encoding. Working at various institutions like the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Max Weber Stiftung Bonn and Birmingham City University I have been able to gather insights into different aspects of Digital Humanities. From 2015 to 2017 and 2019 to 2021 I was involved in the long-term project Corpus Musicae Otto manicae, developing the source catalogue and the MEI representations of the music editions. In 2020, I joined the project “Interpreting the Mensural Notation of Music: An Expert System Based on the Theory of Johannes Tinctoris” as a digital musicologist and developer. In the same year, I completed my dissertation at the Institute of Lingusitics and Literary Studies at Technical University of Darmstadt on “Models for the computational analysis of mensural music traditions”, relying heavily on MEI encodings. Currently (since 2021) I am back at my alma mater, working as a researcher at the Musicology Department at JGU Mainz and teach things like music encoding.
Alongside those activities I found already several opportunities for engagement in the MEI community. As a renaissance music researcher I am proud to be a member of the Mensural Interest Group for several years now. I am also happy to be involved in the development of SibMEI and to serve as a member of the Program Comittee for MEC 2020 and the upcoming MEC 2022.
I am honoured to be nominated as a candidate for the MEI Board. My first contact with MEI was at the very first Music Encoding Conference 2013, and I fell in love with the field of interest and most notably the community. Serving on the Board, I would be excited to continue contributing to the community. One of my aims is making MEI more accessible especially to students and others that are not involved yet but claim interest. Beside that, I am interested in increasing the support of MEI for diverse use cases, regarding tools and analytical applications as well as opening up to different repertoires, like Ottoman music.
I received my diploma in astrophysics in 2007 at Technische Universität Berlin with a thesis on solar winds. I furthered my studies in musicology and Protestant theology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which I completed with a dissertation on the sacred works of Otto Nicolai in 2012 at the Technische Universität Berlin. After my PhD studies, I worked at Bach-Archiv Leipzig from 2011 to 2020, where I was responsible for the structural and technical development of Bach digital. I am also a permanent lecturer in music history at Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Leipzig. Since 2020, I have been working as a music engraving technologist at Enote GmbH in Berlin, leading the internal Verovio development group. Within the MEI community, I am a permanent member of the MEI technical team as well as various interest groups. My academic involvement also includes the position of Co-Convener of the Digital Musicology Section of the German Society for Musicology (GfM).
I am truly honored to have been nominated to stand as a candidate for the upcoming MEI Board election. It is a privilege to be part of this great community! If I was to be elected as a board member, it would be my pleasure to support the good work that is already going on in the community and devote my expertise to this aim in any way I can. Particularly focusing on the development of Verovio, SibMEI, and other tools build around MEI to serve the diverse needs of the community members.
Margrethe Støkken Bue holds a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Oslo, and specialised in critical sheet music editing, music philology and Norwegian music history. She worked for nine years with sheet music archive, editing and production at the Music information Centre in Norway. Bue now works at the National Library of Norway, where her work includes work with MEI and TEI, reviewing digital solutions for notated music, and editing digital publications of music related sources, and will from 2022 start using MerMEId at the National Library. A special research interest is performing arts as text, and she is currently running a small project together with a dance researcher. She manages RISM and RILM in Norway, and is administrative co-chair of MEI Metadata and Cataloging Interest Group.
My first meeting with MEI was through work with MerMEId and TEI. I found that MEI is a very important project that covers several aspects within digital musicology, and a project that needs to be kept going. Through interest and luck, I got the opportunity to work with MEI tutorials, guidelines, metadata and MerMEId, and I find this work very rewarding. I am humbled by the nomination for the board, and being a board member would give me the chance to give more back to the MEI community. The board’s most important work is to facilitate the development of MEI in all areas, making sure that the project and community stays strong and relevant. To ensure future interest and engagement from old and new members, we need to keep today’s perfect combination of high technical and academic level with a welcoming and including environment.