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update pages for elections 2024
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peterstadler committed Nov 27, 2024
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# macOS
.DS_Store

# various IDEs
.idea/
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---
layout: post
title: "MEI Board: Candidate statements 2024"
date: 2024-11-27
categories: update
---

We are pleased to announce the candidates for the 2024 MEI Board elections.
For details, please see their [CVs and candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2024/candidates.html).
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The MEI Board manages the property and business of MEI. It promotes the development of MEI, oversees the activities of the MEI Technical Team, guides the development of the MEI conceptual model, Guidelines and schemata, and acts as a contact point for MEI-related activities. The Board consists of nine elected members and one member designated by each Host Institution. The Board will hold regular, virtual or in-person meetings. As schedules and funding permit, the Board will meet in person at least once per year.

[Read the 2023 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2023/candidates)
[Read the 2024 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2024/candidates)

## Current Board Members

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### Previous elections

* [Read the 2023 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2023/candidates)
* [Read the 2022 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2022/candidates)
* [Read the 2021 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2021/candidates)
* [Read the 2020 Election Candidate statements](/community/mei-board/elections/2020/candidates)
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---
layout: default
title: "2024 Board Election Candidate Statements"
---

# 2024 Board Election Candidates

Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and
Candidate Statement.
These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.

* [Benjamin W. Bohl](#benjamin-w-bohl)
* [Martha Thomae Elias](#martha-thomae-elias)
* [Anna E. Kijas](#anna-e-kijas)
* [Joshua Neumann](#joshua-neumann)
* [Klaus Rettinghaus](#klaus-rettinghaus)
* [Kristina Richts-Matthaei](#kristina-richts-matthaei)


## Benjamin W. Bohl

### CV

Born in 1983 Benjamin finished his studies in musicology in 2008 with his M.A.
thesis on “Combinatorics as a method of composition. Studies on Francesco
Saverio Geminiani’s ›Guida Armonica o Dizionario Armonico‹“, including a digital
edition of the treatise. His affiliation with MEI started with his work at the
Edirom project at Detmold in 2009 and has continued in several other research
contexts. After beginning as an editor at the Bernd Alois
Zimmermann-Gesamtausgabe in 2016, Benjamin today is the project’s research
software engineer. The insights gained as an editor help him identify community
and user needs for his tool development, e.g. the oXygen-MEI-addon.

### Candidate Statement

MEI has been a central aspect of my day-to-day work since the beginning of my
professional career. Seeing it implemented as the backbone of the Edirom
software was only the first step of a worthwhile engagement with both the format
and the emerging community. I was fascinated by the fact that working with MEI
meant working with music professionals worldwide. Seeing all the effort done to
bring together such things as critical editions, diverse historical notations,
or music analysis in a single format on the sole basis of shared interest was
the spirit that fuelled my commitment to MEI.

As Board member, I would love to care for preserving and spreading this spirit
by promoting open communication standards to foster a high rate of community
involvement. Although these general issues might not promote new features in
MEI’s encoding guidelines, I see them as the central aspect of MEI’s success.

Moreover, I envision more frequent stable releases of the MEI schemata and
guidelines and wou would love to foster this through my engagement as Technical
Co-Chair in improving and automating the build and release processes of the MEI
schemata and guidelines.


## Martha Thomae Elias

### CV

I am a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOES project at NOVA University of
Lisbon, where I lead the development of digital tools to support search and
analysis of chants encoded in MEI. With a PhD and Master’s in Music Technology
from McGill University and a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Universidad del
Valle de Guatemala, my academic journey bridges technology, music, and cultural
preservation.

At McGill’s Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries (DDMAL) Lab, I
contributed to the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (
SIMSSA) Research Project, directed by Ichiro Fujinaga, which focuses on
developing computational methods for recognizing music symbols in digital images
of music documents.

In my independent research, I have specialized in the preservation and encoding
of mensural music. I developed the Automatic Scoring-up Tool for mensural
notation, later integrating it into the Measuring Polyphony Editor. My PhD
dissertation focused on digitizing and encoding a Guatemalan polyphonic
choirbook from the colonial period, using optical music recognition, automatic
scoring up, and computational error detection techniques to preserve this
valuable repertoire.

### Candidate Statement

I previously served on the MEI Board, where I focused on advocating for early
music notations, specifically mensural and neume notations. Since then, I have
taught workshops on early music encoding, including sessions on mensural
notation at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference (2023) alongside Anna
Plaksin, and neume notation at the same conference (2024) with Elsa De Luca.

If elected to the Board, I aim to expand MEI’s presence in Latin America by
building on my collaborations with Digital Humanities organizations in the
region, particularly through connections facilitated by Gimena del Rio Riande.
Over the past two years, I have led Spanish-language MEI workshops in Latin
America, including online sessions during Semana HD (2023 and 2024) and an
in-person workshop at the TEI conference in Argentina (2024).

Additionally, I am honored to deliver the closing keynote for the first Latin
American Music Information Retrieval (LAMIR) workshop. These recent developments
have prepared me to help expand the MEI community in Latin America, fostering
its integration within the broader digital humanities landscape.


## Anna E. Kijas

### CV

Anna E. Kijas is the Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship and Lilly Music
Library at Tufts University. Her academic training includes master’s degrees in
library and information science from Simmons College, music with a concentration
in musicology from Tufts University, as well as a bachelor of arts in music
literature and performance from Northeastern University. In 2022, Anna
co-founded [Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online](https://www.sucho.org/),
an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural
heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Through musicology and libraries she became involved with digital humanities,
exploring and pursuing ways in which computational methods and tools can augment
scholarship and publishing. Anna’s interests are centered in pedagogical
approaches and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical
research, and in the use of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access
research and publishing. She is also interested in supporting sustainable ways
of developing digital projects through the use of minimal computing. Since 2018,
Anna has been leading an open-access music incipit encoding
project, [Rebalancing the Music Canon](https://rebalancing-music-canon.com/)
that focuses on making works by historically un(der)-represented people more
discoverable, decentering the musical canon, and making data-driven music
scholarship more diverse and inclusive. More info at <https://annakijas.com/>.

### Candidate Statement

I have been actively contributing to and participating in the MEI community for
the past seven years, including serving as a co-chair of the Digital Pedagogy
Interest Group (2020-2023), Administrative Chair of the MEI Board (2022-2024),
MEC host (2020), and a member of multiple MEC program committees. It would be an
honor to be elected and serve on the MEI Board once more. I would bring a unique
perspective based on my experiences as both a scholar and librarian who is
interested in pushing the boundaries of musicology (and humanities, in general)
not only through the application of computational methods, but also by
considering issues around diversity, accessibility, and sustainability in the
data we create or curate, the research we do, and the projects we develop.
Through the MEI Board, I would advocate for an inclusive and praxis-focused
approach to the ongoing development of MEI. I would continue to identify ways in
which the MEI can support an inclusive and diverse membership, especially by
fostering and supporting emerging or early-career scholars and students.


## Joshua Neumann

### CV

Following a BMus in Music Performance and MM in Music History, Joshua Neumann
authored one of the first digital musicology PhD dissertations in the United
States, focused on performing traditions in Italian Opera and supported by
grants from the US Department of Education and the University of Florida. He
recently completed a term as Executive Editor of The Opera Journal, and
currently serves as co-chair of MEI’s Digital Pedagogy Interest Group. Joining
the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz in 2021, his introduction to the
MEI community came through the conversion of theJoseph Haydn Werke metadata into
MEI. He is currently running a project focused on integrating vocal performance
analysis with notation expression variant-inclusive MEI as a means of examining
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s long association with Die Winterreise in relationship
to modern conceptions of the cycle.

### Candidate Statement

My interest in serving on the MEI Board emanates from my belief in leveraging
the power of digital spaces for enhanced democratization and access to
scholarship, especially documentation and preservation of musical creative
practice and various kinds of musical documents from diverse populations. MEI
rightly situates itself as the world leading standard for representing a broad
range of musical documents and structures and is primed for adaptation for use
with additional musical traditions, both notated and aural/oral. Currently
serving as co-chair of the Digital Pedagogy IG has impressed upon me the need
for being proactive about expanding within the community, and developing
strategic partnerships is a natural possibility. One example is the development
of a partnered-driven pilot project to introduce MEI as cultural preservation
and interdisciplinary education in American secondary schools. Pursuing
opportunities to expand the community and how the technological development both
contribute to MEI’s sustainability and usability as a means of democratizing
music scholarship, cultural preservation, and access thereto.


## Klaus Rettinghaus

### CV

I received my diploma in astrophysics from the Technical University of Berlin in
2007 with a thesis on solar winds. I completed my studies in musicology and
Protestant theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012 with a
dissertation on the sacred works of Otto Nicolai at the Technical University of
Berlin. After my doctorate, I worked at the Bach Archive Leipzig from 2011 to
2020, where I was responsible for the structural and technical development of
Bach digital. For the last four years I have been working as a music engraving
technologist at Enote GmbH in Berlin and lead the internal Verovio development
group. Within the MEI community, I am a permanent member of the MEI technical
team and several interest groups. My academic involvement also includes the
position of co-convener of the Digital Musicology section of the German
Musicological Society (GfM).

### Candidate Statement

I am honoured to have been nominated again as a candidate for the upcoming
election of the MEI Board of Directors. It is a privilege to serve as part of
this great community. I would very much like to continue my work on the Board
and contribute my expertise in any way I can. In particular, I would like to
continue to support the development of Verovio, SibMEI, MuseScore and other
tools that build on MEI to meet the diverse needs of community members.


## Kristina Richts-Matthaei

### CV

Kristina Richts-Matthaei works as a digital humanist at the interface between
library and information science and (digital) musicology. She has been in
contact with MEI for many years and has been primarily involved in the metadata
area and it’s further development. She was spokesperson for the MEI Metadata
Group for many years. Since January 2024, she has been head of the Centre for
Digital Music Documentation (CDMD) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in
Mainz, where she is responsible for all digital aspects of long-term
musicological projects in the Academy's program (data standards, data curation,
long-term archiving, documentation of data processes, project consulting, etc.)
as well as the development of a specialist contact point for the conception,
coordination and further development of digital work catalogs in music and
digital transformation processes for musicological metadata as a whole. In
addition, she is currently leading a DFG project to further develop the MerMEId
metadata editor and is MerMEId Community Manager.

### Candidate Statement

My general interest in MEI is to help to develop it into a data format that
complies with FAIR & CARE principles and that can be used in all parts of the
world for recording musicological phenomena. The MEI community has always proved
to be a very friendly and open-minded community, and this should remain so in
these difficult times.

As my focus is mainly on metadata, I would like to work towards being a neutral
international point of contact for digital catalogs of works based on the MEI
standard, from conceptualization to digital implementation. This will still
require a lot of community-based coordination in order to bring together the
various approaches in the best possible way and to integrate additional
recording options that have not yet been considered, such as the recording of
audio metadata. In this context, it is also important to enhance the ways MEI
interacts with Linked Open Data, thus enriching interoperability of MEI with
other standards.

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