La vihuela desde mi ordenador: la musicología y las humanidades digitales

From the viewpoint of my own research, this paper explores one of the largest challenges of the musicology of the future, namely, the possibilities that result from harnessing computing to musicology. The possibilities that arise from the storage of large quantities of data, of creating tools that will permit a limitless number of associative, reconstructive, analytical and cataloguing operations are already starting to change indelibly the face of musicology, together with the ways in which we communicate the fruit of our research. Using my own work to create a digital habitat for everything that pertains to the vihuela, this paper presents a vision of the future by menas of a platform created to gather and assemble all that is known about the renaissance instrument, it music, its players, instrument builders, and consumers, together with a complete collection of documentary information, bibliography and discography. Within this panorama, the paper also reflects on the way in which this projects represents the triangulations of the traditional, linear relationship that separates the historian from his or her readers. It also contextualises the project among the international trends of today’s musicology