Music Encoding Pedagogy Workshop

Music encoding is a way to create machine readable data about music documents and it has many applications, including long-term preservation, computational analysis, digital editions, and digital publishing. While there are a number of music encoding standards available, this workshop will focus on encoding music documents according to the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) guidelines. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) community has created a schema, guidelines, and other resources that encourage collaboration, interoperability, and open data sharing. MEI has found traction in digital musicology because of its model's ability to capture scholarly findings together with the notation, for example through its richness of metadata fields and expressions. Additionally, it serves a primary role in the creation of scholarly digital editions through its elements for source transcription and textual scholarship. 
This Music Encoding Pedagogy workshop has two objectives. First, we will provide a brief overview of what music encoding is by using use cases and project examples from the MEI community. These examples will help us explore questions about why encoding music is a necessary or useful approach for music students and scholars and how they might approach developing assignments for teaching music encoding in a classroom environment. The use cases and projects will enable us to demonstrate how encoding can 1) enable close reading and music analysis; 2) be used to create digital scholarly, interactive editions; 3) encourage experimentation through critical engagement; and 4) explore data modeling for computational inquiry or analysis (Flanders, Bauman, et al. "TEI Pedagogy and TAPAS Classroom," 2019).
We will lead participants in a document analysis exercise during the first part of the workshop in order to encourage discussion around form, structure, critical commentary, analysis, and other features found in the musical document that they might consider encoding based on several different use cases. Best practices, strategies, and challenges will also be considered.
The second aim of this workshop is to briefly introduce participants to a straightforward workflow through which they can generate an MEI file using music notation software, create metadata in the MEI header section, and render an MEI file in a modern browser. Participants will use open source tools during this workshop, including MuseScore notation software, Atom Editor or VSCode editor, and Verovio. 
By the end of the workshop, participants will have a better understanding of the various use cases and applications of music encoding, including why, and how it might be applied for pedagogical purposes. Participants will also be able to generate an MEI file from a music document and create a metadata header. This workshop will not provide in-depth coverage of the MEI guidelines, software programming or schemas, optical music recognition (OMR), other encoding standards, or in-depth details of the encoding of the music notation itself, which in this case is left to automatic conversion.