Encoding medieval music notation for research

In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a medieval music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of these data in both medieval and modern notation. Scribe data have proved essential for creating statistical and comparative analyses, compositional analyses and producing online thematic indices for the Medieval Music Database over a large body of music. Even though the Scribe still functions in cross-platform DOS-emulated computer environments, the growth of Digital Humanities, linked open data and enormous potential for online research collaboration offers a series of opportunities for encoded medieval music notation data. This report details the authors' efforts since 2013 in converting Scribe's data into open access data based upon the standard being developed by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). When coupled with recent developments in the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, our new Scribe-based module, known as NeoScribe, offers significant enhancements to the MEI standard that stand to benefit current and future developments in digital musicology.