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The Digital Baermann

Experimental publishing for embodied research

What is experimental publishing?

‘Experimental publishing’ is an umbrella term for publications that experiment with alternatives to the normal scholarly formats such as the journal article and monograph (see Adema et al, 2022). This can include the experimentation with multi-media, interactive elements, databases, or code; the re-presentation of existing published material; the fixity and versioning of the publication; the relationship between author(s), reviewers and readers; and the processes of publication and peer-review. The Digital Baermann contains several experimental features: it is a web-based, multimedia publication that includes the facility for users to interact in new ways with a previously-published text (Baermann’s Vollständige Clarinett-Schule); it incorporates an annotated database of sources; it is an experiment in ‘public-first’, ‘progressive enhancement’ publication whereby the core research is designed to be accessible to a broad user-base outside of academia; it is designed to reflect the open-ended and unfinished nature of artistic research by remaining open for updated versions; and it is envisioned as an experiment in open review practices.

Experimental Publishing is also a critical practice that questions the status quo: ‘experimental forms and practices of publishing open up and explore questions around modalities, linearity, workflow, and the relationalities of publishing; they examine established practices that we have often been taking for granted or have been repeating uncritically within conventional forms of publishing—where they have become solidified in standard print- and codex-based publishing forms and practices.’ (Adema et al, 2022: 8). As an experiment in multimedia web publishing for embodied research, The Digital Baermann asks fundamental questions: what kinds of knowledge are being communicated, for who, and in what form? How can we disrupt the linear, hierarchical model that places musicologists ‘upstream’ and practitioners ‘downstream’ in the flow of information; that relies on academics from outside the community of practice for peer review; and that translates embodied and artistic knowledge into the language of the scholarly ‘insider’, rather than that of the community of practice within which it developed?

The Digital Baermann critically engages with these and other questions through its structure, content, and publishing workflow. The publication is an ongoing experiment in the potential of experimental multimedia web publishing for embodied research. The following discussion outlines the characteristics and principles that are emerging as the publication develops and is envisaged as the basis for a fuller discussion of the intersection between experimental publishing principles with embodied and artistic research in a future, separately-published output.

Why use web publication for embodied research?

Even more so than other areas of music scholarship, embodied research and the knowledge it produces is, by definition, poorly served by traditional print publications, even when they feature a ‘companion website’ accessed through hyperlinks. The use of audio and video documentation is essential in embodied research, and one of the key aims of the Baermann’s Body project was to explore and model how emerging multimedia tools and dissemination models could be used to communicate the research. Web publications are ideal for handling multi-media materials as well as digitised historical sources. Of the established tools available at the outset of the project in 2023, the Scalar platform was selected for two reasons. First, it offers rich possibilities for linking media and text in almost limitless ways through non-linear ’paths’ that can bring together content from anywhere in the publication. Second, as an open-source platform designed to be used by academics with minimal technical expertise, it satisfied the project aim to focus on communication methods that are accessible to users (particularly independent practitioners) with limited or no financial or technical support.

Web publication, digital humanities and the research process

‘If experimental forms of publishing make one thing clear, it is that content and form are entangled (i.e., media forms, workflows, and infrastructures are never ‘neutral’) (Adema et al, 2022: 12).

When planning the project, I considered the publication format largely in terms of its ability to communicate the research to others. What I hadn’t anticipated was the impact this decision would on the process and design of the research itself. From a Digital Humanities perspective, digital publication of this kind is a process of modelling, not representation, whereby a ‘complex scholarly object’ is modelled through a ‘digital surrogate’ that enables it to be viewed and treated in specific ways:

The point of the model is not to reproduce the original in full. … The model’s role should be to simplify, to make a complex case tractable so that we can analyse, manipulate, and communicate it more effectively and not get bogged down in irrelevant details. (Pierazzo, 2014: 19)

In this sense, any publication of an object is also a model of it: it is a simplification, but one designed for a specific audience and purpose. When we ‘publish a complex scholarly object’, we are making decisions about what information to include and what to omit. Rather than reproducing the original, our aim in this context should be to do things we could not do with the original’ (Pierazzo, 2014: 19).

As a piece of historical research, The Digital Baermann offers a digital surrogate for the complex scholarly object that is Baermann’s Vollständige Clarinett-Schule. Mere digital scans of the volume’s pages do not themselves convey the sounds, meanings and embodied practices that are encoded in its notation and trained through its realisation in the body of a musician. The original Schule is arguably itself an analogue surrogate for the embodied practice that it represents, and by creating a multi-media digital surrogate – that is a web-based representation of the text annotated with audio-visual realisations and commentary – we are able to analyse and contextualise it in ways that the original does not afford.

Though Pierazzo’s discussion relates to the creation of digital surrogates for texts, her theory can equally be applied to embodied research, where the complex scholarly object is the practice itself. It is never possible to fully capture and reproduce multi-modal embodied knowledge and live embodied practice in a fixed publication. What we can do is model this complex scholarly object in a variety of ways through the fixed traces that it generates: an audio-visual recording; reflections based on the practitioner’s memory of their experience; images of the annotations scribed on the printed notation; the materials assembled to enable the action itself; and the conceptualisation that surrounds it. Each of these traces and their innumerable combinations open possibilities and perspectives for the analysis, discussion, contextualisation of the absent object – the practice itself. As a repository of these traces and the discussion they afford, a web publication such as The Digital Baermann becomes a macro-model of the embodied practice and the knowledge that structures it. Moreover, the process of constructing it – of modelling the embodiment – is thus not simply an output, but a research method. The Digital Baermann is therefore not only a digital publication but a digital humanities project in the sense of ‘engaging with technology as a tool, object of enquiry, medium of expression, activist venue and more’ (Svensson, 2012: 54).

Another emergent theme of The Digital Baermann is the linking and contextualising of digitised source materials. The sources related to Carl Baermann are, typically for a nineteenth-century wind player, scattered across many repositories and unserved by any systematic catalogue or research resource. It was essential to locate and map these sources at the outset of the project, linking metadata, notes, and the sources themselves in a traditional offline system of spreadsheets, text documents and downloaded files is awkward at best and lends itself to the unnecessary and potentially inaccurate duplication of information in multiple locations.

Working experimentally with Scalar, however, allowed me to see possibilities that would both make the management of my sources easier during the research process, and re-think the relationship between these private research notes and the public presentation of the material. The possibility within Scalar to embed digitised materials such as scores, letters and newspaper articles directly from their host repositories sparked the idea of creating a ‘Virtual Archive’ out of Baermann’s scattered documents. Not only can each source be viewed on a single page with its metadata and my contextualising research notes, but these pages can be linked directly with the pages where they are discussed or cited, creating a network of information across the publication and allowing users to move seamlessly between discussion and sources.

My intention with these pages was also to open up my research notes to others to continue the work. The task of constructing an exhaustive documentary study of the Baermann family is beyond the scope of this project and outside of my focus on embodied and artistic research. It is my hope, however, that other researchers will continue the work I have started in mapping the life and work of this important nineteenth-century musician. This aspect of The Digital Baermann has the potential to become a collaborative project. From this perspective, it made no sense to keep my research notes private and closed, but rather to publish them to the wider community.

Public-First and Progressive Enhancement

Another aim of the Baermann’s Body project was to explore ways to engage with academic, practitioner and education communities. Web publication offers rich and flexible possibilities for engaging with different user groups and modalities, as well immediacy and visibility, the potential for integration with social media platforms, and greater accessibility features compared to traditional publications. Most importantly, it can be Open Access – i.e. free at the point of use. Web publications for music research are not new: an early and well-known example of a web-based monograph published outside of the usual academic publishing channels is Daniel Leech Wilkinson’s The Changing Sound Of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances, published online through the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, a project funded by the AHRC between 2004–2009. Leech-Wilkinson experimented further with web self-publication with his 2020 ebook Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them, published on a web platform as part of the multimedia Challenging Performance project. Leech-Wilkinson presents both publications as a critique of the cost and accessibility of traditional academic publishing, reflecting his concern to directly reach his intended audience and engage with readers outside of the academic community.

Initially, it was the simple desire to engage beyond the academic community that made me decide to share my research through a web publication. However, as the project has developed and I have had to make strategic choices about the relationship between The Digital Baermann and other project outputs intended for traditional publication routes such as journals, I – initially unknowingly – started to develop what Bath (2019) describes as a ‘Public-First’, ‘progressive enhancement’ model of research and dissemination. The ‘Public First’ approach, whether in traditional research, Digital Humanities, or artistic research, is research that develops from engagement with publics and communities of interest, towards more focused specific scholarly modes of discourse – rather than the other way around. ‘Progressive enhancement’ is a term used in in web development to refer to sites whose design starts from the point of accommodating the widest user base – such as ensuring that all of the core features can be accessed using the broadest range of technology, as opposed to ‘graceful degradation’ whereby the most sophisticated and up-to-date technology is assumed for the core design and ‘lite’ versions are offered to the users who cannot access it. Bath argues that ‘much current public humanities work falls into the category of graceful degradation, or academy first; we begin by creating the complex project, because that is what we have been trained to do and what we get rewarded for doing, and have the best intentions to re-package it for public audiences. How much we actually accomplish to this end depends on the amount of time and money we have left after the initial academic research is published, which is generally little. … we would be well served to consider various publics as an equal audience for our outputs, rather than as just an afterthought or a bit of fluff in a grant application’ (Bath, 2019: 8).

For the Baermann’s Body project, a Public-First/Progressive Enhancement analogy aptly describes the decision to begin with what in other projects might have been considered the final, ‘public engagement’ phrase: a web publication, The Digital Baermann, that is opened up to a broad range of publics ranging from academics to HIP practitioners, clarinet teachers, and students, to the general musical public. The research is not simply summarised here, but actively developed through this platform where it is presented in a relatively raw and provisional form for interaction and feedback by these communities. This process will in turn feed into the development of more technical and detailed publications for dissemination to specific sectors of scholarly community through more traditional academic publishing routes. However, these publications will not supersede The Digital Baermann; rather, the two kinds of output will be mutually supportive, with The Digital Baermann remaining the hub and keystone publication for the research.

Open Peer Review

This commitment to engaging with different communities throughout the development of the publication extends to the process of peer review. In traditional academic publishing, work is only released to the public once a lengthy process of peer review and editorial revision has resulted in a finalised, agreed and ‘accepted’ version that is fixed in print. The open, potentially unfinished nature of experimental web publishing challenges this established workflow, because web pages invite frequent expansion and updating, and can be made public at any stage in the process (Risam, 2014). This situation offers some particular advantages for the publication of embodied research.

Embracing the iterative nature of web publishing challenges us as researchers to let go of the notion that our published work should somehow be definitive, a scholarly territory to be staked out and defended at all costs, and instead keep our work open to revisions as our own and others’ research moves understanding every forwards. This stance is particularly apt for performance, where artistic outputs can never claim to be definitive. On the other hand, the necessity to produce a stable version of The Digital Baermann – not least to satisfy the requirements of the UK’s national research assessment exercise, REF 2029 – have to be taken into consideration. Fortunately, Scalar incorporates versioning functionality to enable a fixed ‘Edition’ of the publication to be published as a stable reference point, which remains available even if subsequent changes are made.

In embodied research challenges the traditional academic ‘gold standard’ of double-blind peer review in a number of ways. First, double-blind review (where the author and reviewers are anonymous to each other) is often impossible due to the specificity of the research and the use of audio-visual material that may identify the author. Second, where there is limited overlap between the academic community and the community of practice, relying solely on the perspective of academic reviewers may not serve the research well: they may only be able to engage with it as an outsider, and at worst may be insufficiently qualified to assess it or insist that the author develop the work in a direction that devalues the practitioner perspective.

With web publication, however, it is possible to involve the community of practice in the work as it progresses by inviting feedback on drafts and allowing reader perspectives to shape the ongoing work. This established Open Review practice, sometimes called ‘crowdsourced peer review’ or ‘community/public review’ (Ross-Hellauer, 2017) is particularly valuable in a field such as nineteenth-century woodwind performance, where the scholarly community is very small and relatively new in comparison to a much larger and more established community of professional practitioners whose experience and expertise has developed over several decades. As well as harnessing a wider range of expertise, the publishing of pre-review manuscripts (common practice in science disciplines) has clear reported benefits for both the transparency and the quality of the resulting research. The review process for The Digital Baermann is thus planned in two stages. First, working drafts of selected sections will published during the project and shared with relevant communities of practitioners and scholars, who can respond using the comment section on each page of the site. Once the first edition of The Digital Baermann is complete, a second stage of reviewing will take place: an independent party will solicit peer reviews solicited from experts in relevant fields and their feedback incorporated in the usual way.

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