Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.
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, digital solutions for notated music, and editing digital publications of music related sources. She is also subject specialist (Fachreferent) in classical music. 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.
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.
Maristella Feustle is the Music Special Collections Librarian at the University of North Texas. She also holds degrees in music theory and in jazz guitar. Her interests in music and archival practice include seeking new avenues for the preservation and accessibility of the over 160 collections in the UNT Music Library. Since 2020, she has led a project to encode early editions of Jean-Baptiste Lully operas in the library’s collection using MEI.
Creating training materials for the Lully project was the catalyst for her involvement in the MEI Pedagogy Interest Group, and she has led or co-led workshops on MEI basics at the 2021 and 2022 Music Encoding Conferences.
Outside of MEI, she has published multiple articles and book chapters, and has presented in the U.S., Canada, Poland, Hungary, and Germany.
My experiences with MEI and with the community of MEI users provide consistent motivation to spread the word about MEI and encourage its use as widely as possible. MEI’s cost-effectiveness, open lines of communication, and range of uses for research, description, analysis, and discoverability of information offer a compelling set of features to support and open new avenues of music scholarship. All of these attributes resonate with core values of librarianship, in which we strive to connect users with the information, skills, and tools they need.
Therefore, it would be an honor to serve on the MEI Board. In addition to assisting the Board in its current and future priorities, I will advocate for assessing and resolving obstacles to implementation, with an emphasis on effective pedagogy and outreach to new users.
I have a “mixed” background in musicology, media sciences and computing, and would consider myself as digital humanist. Since about 15 years, I’m actively involved in the development of MEI, both as a standard and as a community. Originally coming from the field of complete works editions, I have been pushing digital scholarly editions throughout my work life, having been involved in projects like Edirom, Freischütz Digital, and Beethovens Werkstatt.
I am honored to be nominated for the MEI Board elections again, and I still feel like I can contribute to MEI as a whole. One thing that I would particularly like to improve is the connection to the TEI, as a community, but perhaps even more importantly on a technological level. The 2023 conference, which my wonderful colleagues in Paderborn and I will be hosting as a joint conference of both communities, will hopefully help to bring us closer together again.
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 Ottomanicae, 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 Linguistics and Literary Studies at Technical University of Darmstadt on “Models for the computational analysis of mensural music traditions”, relying heavily on MEI encodings. Since 2021 I am back at my alma mater, working as a researcher at the Department of Musicology 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 and to support the work as co-chair since 2022. I am also happy to be involved in the development of sibMEI and having served as a member of the Program Committee for MEC 2020 and 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.
As the originator of MEI, I think I’m uniquely qualified to serve on the MEI Board. Except for a brief interruption, I have been on the Board since its inception. Due to the length and breadth of my knowledge and experience, I can represent diverse perspectives and constituencies. I am thankful for the MEI community for believing in its mission and contributing to its development. I look forward to developing MEI further and supporting the community that surrounds it.
I completed my PhD at McGIll University’s School of Information Studies, where I was first introduced to the Music Encoding Initiative through collaborations at CIRMMT. I spent four years as a postdoctoral research associate in Music and Linked Data at the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre, where I started using MEI in earnest collaborating in the development of the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework and its application to diverse use-cases in music rehearsal, performance, (re-)composition, annotation, and scholarly communication. Since 2018, I have worked at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, employing MEI as semantic scaffolding in the development of interactive applications around digital music notation.
I have engaged in teaching MEI and related topics at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (2015–18, 2022), the Edirom Summer School (2019), and the Extended Semantic Web Conference (2022), and have helped to organise tutorials and workshops at the Music Encoding Conference (Linked Data and Music Encoding, 2019; Developing Verovio, 2020; Semantic Data Modelling, 2022). I was a Programme Committee member for MEC 2019, have acted as co-convener of the MEI Linked Data Interest Group since 2020, and served as Programme Chair of MEC 2022.
As MEI continues to establish itself as a de facto standard for digital music scholarship, I’m encouraged by signs of growing interest from other directions, including music rehearsal and performance. Uptake in these areas has thus far been limited by mutually reinforcing challenges of scarce availability of publicly licensed encodings, and a relative lack of dedicated (MEI-specific) editorial tooling to help smooth the learning curve and facilitate participation of new audiences in encoding activities.
If elected as a member of the MEI Board, my priority would be to support the fantastic efforts by community members and interest groups to address these challenges over recent years, particularly through the ongoing creation and dissemination of documentation and tutorial materials addressing lay audiences. At the same time, I will continue seeking community input to mei-friend, the Web-based MEI editor we’re developing at mdw, aiming to make it more useful to the wider community; and find ways of supporting other efforts developing new tools or extending established ones toward facilitated encoding with MEI for new users.
I feel honoured and grateful to have been nominated for this position, and look forward to continued involvement with this wonderfully interdisciplinary, open, and welcoming community.