Digital Mapping and Musicological Claims to Authority

Abstract

Maps offer musicologists promising ways to improve teaching and public outreach, while presenting fundamental challenges when it comes to doing musicological research and writing music history. Drawing on a range of student-generated and professionally produced mapping projects, this article demonstrates the diverse musicological functions that digital maps can serve, from pedagogical tools and archival portals to instruments of historiographic correction.

Musicologists can productively leverage evidence-rich digital maps to present a larger sample with greater depth and therefore a more comprehensive vantage point on the story being told—a capacity theorized by Todd Presner and collaborators as “thick mapping.” Yet maps do not make arguments on their own. Too often musicologists map the data they have, putting a scientistic, authoritative sheen on historical narratives that might otherwise be ripe for revision. Countermapping—appropriating the perceived authority of cartography to represent what has long gone unrepresented—provides one kind of corrective, as do emerging techniques for visualizing uncertainty and humanizing data.

Ultimately, humanists in general and musicologists in particular should embrace mapping as a heuristic: a tool that facilitates musicological work, but neither a methodology nor an end in itself. With an eye towards questioning the authority that maps purport to wield, musicologists can engage in mapping as process, play, and a tool for revising and re-presenting how we see and hear music history while keeping music, and humanistic epistemology, at the center of our work.