Revising MEI for Research on Late Medieval Manuscripts

Abstract

This paper illustrates opportunities for revising the current Chant and Mensural modules of the Music Encoding Initiative for encoding music notation from before c.1500. Repurposing data collected over the last three decades in Scribe music encoding software required a bespoke MEI module, which we have called NeoScribe. The Scribe project has benefited from the long-term investigation and implementation of methods for the efficient encoding of late medieval music notation. With Scribe, users are able to represent every meaningful scribal mark on the written page, something that is not currently possible in the current MEI Chant and Mensural modules. In converting Scribe data to a MEI-compliant XML, we recognised the need to retain Scribe's nuance-rich encoding of medieval musical notation. For zero dataloss, new elements and data types were added to MEI for encoding late medieval chant and mensural notation. We demonstrate some of NeoScribe's enhanced features for encoding 14th-century repertoires. We conclude by discussing some of the benefits of revising the MEI Chant and Mensural modules for projects investigating music from before c.1500.