Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR) special collection - Call for Papers
Digital Musicology
Deadline for submissions 31.05.2025
Scope of the collection
This special collection serves as a platform for an interdisciplinary dialogue between music technology and musicology, promoting scholarly discussions on the application and usability of digital technologies to enhance music research, and capturing contemporary trends and emerging directions in digital musicology scholarship. It is simultaneously inspired by the recent “Digital Technologies Applied to Music Research Conference: Methodologies, Projects and Challenges” (Lisbon, 06.2024), alongside reflections and consolidation celebrating a decade of contributions from the international Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM), which held its first event in London in September 2014.
We welcome discussions on pressing issues in the digital humanities, such as cultural heritage preservation, FAIR principles and interconnected repertories, digital sustainability, and increasing awareness and access to digital music in non-academic contexts. We also provide a venue for reflecting upon, re-evaluating, and revisiting research previously presented at DLfM, which has since been substantially extended or adapted, or for surveying and summarising technologies and methodologies that have emerged as instrumental or prevalent in the digital musicology research community. By bringing together scholars from digital libraries, humanities, computational musicology, and MIR, this collection aims to foster a broader mutual understanding of the needs, challenges, and desired outcomes within each of these areas. It seeks to help scholars evaluate methodologies and research questions, ultimately contributing to the development of new, more dynamic, inclusive and integrated research that benefits from diverse contributions. From a musicologist’s perspective, it will explore how digital technologies are transforming research practices and examine the extent of interdisciplinary collaboration between historical musicologists and music technology scholars in advancing our understanding and use of music.
• Ichiro Fujinaga. Professor at McGill University
• David Lewis. Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London
• Kevin Page. Senior Researcher and Associate Faculty at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre
• Martha Thomae. Post-doctoral researcher at CESEM-IN2PAST, NOVA University Lisbon
Submission Guidelines
Please submit through https://transactions.ismir.net, and note in your cover letter that your paper is intended to be part of this Special Collection Digital Musicology.
Submissions should adhere to the formatting guidelines of the TISMIR journal: https://transactions.ismir.net/about/submissions/. Specifically, articles must be no longer than 8,000 words, including references, citations, and notes.
Please also note that if the paper extends or combines the authors’ previously published research, a significant novel contribution is expected in the submission (as a rule of thumb, we expect at least 50% of the underlying work—the ideas, concepts, methods, results, analysis, and discussion—to be new).
If you are considering submitting to this special issue, it would greatly help our planning if you let us know by replying to elsadeluca@fcsh.unl.pt.