Jean-Benjamin de Laborde's Choix de chansons: A Digital Critical Edition

Performing Transdisciplinarity is an Australia Research Council Discovery Project which aims to create a transdisciplinary digital critical edition of Jean-Benjamin de Laborde’s 1774 Choix de chansons, an illustrated songbook which, through its combination of image, music and poetry, provides a fascinating insight into the interests and networks of the French royal court. As a transdisciplinary digital humanities project, Performing Transdisciplinarity presents some unique challenges as it bridges musicology, art history and French literature studies to combine elements such as musical performance, visual culture analysis and literary analysis through scholarship and metadata. With data and metadata from the Choix de chansons’ four volumes of 600 pages amounting to some 100 prints (generating upwards of 500 thematic keywords) and 156 songs (3 hours of studio recordings and 24,000 words of text), it has taken more than a little trial and error and creative thinking to work through how to extract, store, organise and analyse the songbook’s contents. As the project now approaches its online manifestation, it’s possible to look back and see how this transdisciplinary study elicited innovative approaches even in its early stages and can provide something of a model for other projects which traverse disciplinary boundaries.