The Crowdsourced Digital Archive: Advancing Scholarship in Community with the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project

• In Event: Digital Zamlers: The Oral Torah & Realizing An-sky's Dream of Engaged Jewish Culture-Making

Abstract

In November 2020, the Klezmer Institute launched the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) - an international digital humanities project to make materials collected by Zinovy Kiselgof during An-ski Expeditions and the Makonovetsky Wedding Manuscript available for researchers and musicians around the world to engage with first hand. KMDMP began as an unfunded initiative with four guiding principles: free access to materials, reduce/eliminate barriers to participation, make digital outputs immediately available, and practice open-source principles. After developing a low-cost, accessible, and adaptable digital structure, the project team specifically chose to release the unedited scans to the public and invite interested individuals to contribute their time and expertise for the transcription, translation, and digital notation of the handwritten manuscripts. The early days of the project brought together an international community to collaborate in non-hierarchical, active learning environments, where enthusiastic discussions empower all participants as independent researchers and directly influence the project's development. Today, the project is supported in part by an NEH Planning Grant to develop a set of Scholarly Editions, which will feature curated selections of the music and text found in the KMDMP corpus presented in three different formats. The crowdsourced and collaborative nature of this project centers heritage practitioners who are deeply invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture—but don't have academic institutional affiliations—as active participants alongside scholars and archivists. The crowdsourcing phase of the project brought together an international community to collaborate in non-hierarchical, active learning environments, where enthusiastic discussions empower all participants as independent researchers and directly influence the project's development. The Scholarly Editions team—leading contributors in the crowdsourcing phase, renowned klezmer performers, and senior scholars—is combining traditional scholarly editions strategies with pedagogical methodologies for non-Western music to create an academically rigorous and broadly useful collection. We argue that this method of publicly engaged research (with the use of low cost, minimal barrier to entry digital tools) is critical for the advancement of Jewish music scholarship and serves as a springboard for new creative outputs inspired by this essential cultural legacy.

Authors

• Christina Crowder, christina crowder

• Clara Byom, The Klezmer Institute