0.14 The evia project: many challenges, some solutions  (Page 8/9)

One of the recommendations made by external participants at early project workshops was the inclusion of more scholarly content than had originally been envisaged, in the form of detailed commentary on the sources themselves, on the philological significance of the variants revealed through the juxtaposition of sources, and on the interpretive issues arising from those variants. The project team incorporated this suggestion within the pilot itself, whereas other recommendations were addressed for the first time in Phase 1, including the implementation of personal annotation tools.

Scholarly commentary written by members of the OCVE team exists at three levels within the Phase 1 resource. First, each work has an “Overview” section which describes the general character and provenance of the individual sources relevant to it. Second, each witness has a more detailed “Source Description” including catalogue metadata, which is stored in the database in a structured XML format which could form the basis of a structured search at a later date. Finally, descriptions of “Key Features” and detailed “Bar-level Commentary” text devised for nominated works within the Phase 1 resource have been entered into the newly developed annotation system. In addition to highlighting salient details of a given source, the “Key Features” text typically provides relevant background information to it. Reference may be made under this heading to other sources (whether or not they appear in OCVE) for the sake of comparison. Significant modifications and errors will usually be highlighted; however, in no case is the discussion exhaustive, nor—as noted above—are “Key Features” identified for all OCVE sources. Instead, the (extensive) scholarly material presented in the resource is meant to be instructive and indicative rather than fully comprehensive; this intentionally selective approach is 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.

The new annotation system allows the bar-level comments to be associated with single bars or bar ranges across single or multiple sources, and so represents a logical development of the annotation system developed in the pilot study. However, the level of sophistication is now greater, likewise the potential of this material to serve as a model for individual users in constructing their own “Critical Commentaries” in the form of personal and/or public annotations (see below). All of the individual scholarly comments pertaining to a given source can also be viewed in an aggregate form approximating a standard “Critical Commentary.”

It should be noted that OCVE’s editorial approach is neutral in respect to the available sources, in that these are presented without qualitative judgments being made in terms of hierarchy or respective pre-eminence. As OCVE is not presenting a single version of a music text, individual editorial decisions of this kind are not required. We do, however, report on relevant variants and corrections of errors and omissions in one or more sources, and typically the user is invited to compare one source with another when looking at a set of bar-level comments.