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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +layout: default |
| 3 | +title: "2025 Board Election Candidate Statements" |
| 4 | +--- |
| 5 | + |
| 6 | +# 2025 Board Election Candidates |
| 7 | + |
| 8 | +Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname. |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +* [Jesse P. Karlsberg](#jesse-p-karlsberg) |
| 11 | +* [Emerson Morgan](#emerson-morgan) |
| 12 | +* [Anna Plaksin](#anna-plaksin) |
| 13 | +* [David Weigl](#david-weigl) |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +## Jesse P. Karlsberg |
| 16 | + |
| 17 | +### CV |
| 18 | + |
| 19 | +I am senior digital scholarship strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and associated faculty in the Department of Music at Emory University. I have a PhD in American music studies from Emory University with a certificate in digital scholarship and media studies (2015), an MFA in integrated electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2006), and a BA in music and philosophy from Wesleyan University (2003). |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +At Emory I direct the [Sounding Spirit Collaborative](https://soundingspirit.org/), an initiative thematic collections, reference resources, and scholarly editions with historical vernacular sacred music from the southern United States which received four major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I also coordinate our center’s digital humanities publishing program. My interest centers on developing the tooling, infrastructures, standards, and collaborations needed to facilitate the creation of open resources for digital musicology featuring vernacular musics. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +I became interested in MEI through my work digitizing, indexing, and developing scholarly editions of historical sacred vernacular song. I served on the program committee for the 2024 Music Encoding Conference where I also presented on music encoding in approaches to indexing hymnody and served as a session chair. |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +### Candidate Statement |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +As a relatively new active member of the MEI community who has nonetheless admired the organization's work and sought counsel from community members for a decade, I would be honored to join the MEI Board and contribute to this undertaking that benefits . I would bring a unique perspective based on my experiences as a music scholar, digital humanist, and digital publisher interested in how we expand the range of corpora available for teaching and study to include marginalized and vernacular musics. |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +Through the MEI Board, I would advocate for the accommodation in MEI of the music notational variety expressed in such vernacular and marginalized music traditions. I would also seek to identify ways that the MEI can grow by creating opportunities, resources, and programming for early-career scholars, researchers without robust technical training, and students. Finally, I am interested in contributing to discussions about how MEI can continue to grow as an interoperable component of infrastructures for digital publication and research projects ranging from scholarly editions to reference resources such as indexes and databases and thematic collections such as digital libraries and exhibits. |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +## Emerson Morgan |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +### CV |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +Emerson Morgan is the Music Librarian at Vassar College and formerly the Librarian for Special Collections at the Oberlin Conservatory Library. He holds a PhD in Historical Musicology (Harvard), MS in Archives Management (Simmons), MAR (Yale), and AB (Vassar). He served as Project Cataloger in the U.S. RISM Office, 2016–20, and Metadata Analyst at Artstor, 2001–7. He served as the liaison from the Music Library Association to the American Musicological Society, 2022–25, and serves as a member of the advisory council to the Riemenschneider Bach Institute at Baldwin Wallace University. |
| 36 | + |
| 37 | +His technical experience includes development of XML schemata at Artstor for harvesting and harmonizing descriptive metadata about works of art and images. He has participated in workshops about TEI encoding of Latin and vernacular medieval manuscripts at Yale and CNRS-IRHT, and has offered workshops on music manuscript fragments to specialists and generalists at Harvard and Oberlin. He has published source studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, and written a doctoral dissertation on processions, chant, and civic participation in Normandy in the high and late middle ages. |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +### Candidate Statement |
| 40 | + |
| 41 | +My experience with music encoding extends from new music to corpus analysis of manuscript and print sources. I am especially focused on the artifactual, social, cultural, and aesthetic understandings that music encoding and analysis can reveal for diverse groups of people. |
| 42 | + |
| 43 | +I enjoy working at the intersection of the technical and humanistic. In my doctoral dissertation, I applied Levenshtein distance (edit distance) to compare the relative similarity or difference of certain series of chants found in medieval music books, showing the fit of this mathematical technique to musicological puzzles about origin and provenance. As a cataloger for RISM, I encoded the European notation found in a unique bimusical Bengali-English opera manuscript from 1876 held at Harvard. This prompted my collaborators and I to publish our reflections upon the administrative, ethical, and national implications of transcribing non-European music for research use in the Global North. I am keenly interested in contributing to the tools and infrastructures of music encoding as well as its humanistic uses. |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | +## Anna Plaksin |
| 46 | + |
| 47 | +### CV |
| 48 | + |
| 49 | +Soon after graduating in Musicology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universtät Mainz, I discovered the field of Digital Humanities and Music Encoding. Working at various institutions like the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Max Weber Stiftung Bonn, Birmingham City University, JGU Mainz, and Paderborn University, I gained insights into different aspects of Digital Humanities and Digital Musicology. |
| 50 | +As a researcher, I work in Digital Musicology, Music Encoding, and corpus-based methods in music research. Also, I regularly teach courses in Music Encoding and Digital Musicology. |
| 51 | + |
| 52 | +I have been actively engaged with the MEI community: as co-chair of the Mensural Interest Group since 2022; as a developer for tools using MEI and helping others to work with MEI like sibMEI, the Sibelius to MEI plugin, and the mei-friend editor. In the organisation of the Music Encoding Conference, I am already involved as a member of the Program Committee (MEC 2020, 2022, and 2026) and as Chair of the Program Committee for MEC 2025 in London. I already served as a member of the MEI Baord in the term 2023-2025. |
| 53 | + |
| 54 | +### Candidate Statement |
| 55 | + |
| 56 | +I am honoured to be nominated again as a candidate for the MEI Board. My first contact with MEI was at the very first Music Encoding Conference 2013, and I fell in love with the field of interest and most notably this open and welcoming community. Since then, the MEI community plays a significant role in my academic journey. |
| 57 | + |
| 58 | +As a member of the Board, my goal is to continue serving this community while working towards making MEI more inclusive and accessible to a wide range of users. Specifically, I aim to foster greater engagement with students and newcomers who are eager to explore music encoding, as well as increase support of MEI for diverse use cases that showcase the versatility of our standard by developing tools and analytical applications that cater to various needs, while also actively seeking out and embracing different repertoires to further enrich our community's work. |
| 59 | + |
| 60 | +## David Weigl |
| 61 | + |
| 62 | +### CV |
| 63 | + |
| 64 | +I completed my PhD at McGIll University’s School of Information Studies, where I was first introduced to the Music Encoding Initiative through collaborations at CIRMMT. I spent four years as a postdoctoral research associate in Music and Linked Data at the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre, where I started using MEI in earnest collaborating in the development of the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework and its application to diverse use-cases in music rehearsal, performance, (re-)composition, annotation, and scholarly communication. Since 2018, I have worked at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, employing MEI as semantic scaffolding in the development of interactive applications around digital music notation. As part of this work, I have co-developed mei-friend, a friendly browser-based editor for music encodings. Over the next four years I will be Principal Investigator of a newly-funded project employing mei-friend within semi-automated workflows to establish a citizen science platform for encoding and validation of music scores by crowds of contributors with varying levels of technical expertise. |
| 65 | + |
| 66 | +### Candidate Statement |
| 67 | + |
| 68 | +It has been a privilege to work as a Member of the MEI Board over the past three years. This period has seen several laudible developments undertaken by the community to make MEI available to wider audiences, including efforts to increase the accessibility of encoding tools, to simplify the build process and improve documentation, and in internationalisation, making pedagogical materials and tool interfaces available in a growing set of languages. Lowering barriers of access to music encoding technologies forms a key priority of my research, and I would be very pleased to continue pursuing this from a Board perspective if re-elected. |
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