Digital exhibitions of music and performance are commonly evaluated through their collections, while the interface decisions organizing access and interpretation receive less sustained attention. This article asks how exhibition design makes a curatorial argument through navigation, description, and metadata when materials concern music, theatre, dance, opera, and related performance cultures. It compares selected institutional resources from the Library of Congress, British Library, Smithsonian Institution, and Europeana as interface-based cases rather than repositories of isolated objects. Comparative analysis follows navigation paths, captions, image alternatives, metadata displays, search functions, and transitions between overview and detail. The study argues that navigation order establishes causal and chronological priorities, that accessible description can deepen interpretation when it explains relations rather than merely naming objects, and that metadata visibility redistributes curatorial authority between institutions and users. Connecting accessibility to interpretation, the article offers a relational account of digital performing-arts curation.

Curating the Screen examines how digital exhibitions of music and performance turn interface choices into historical and interpretive arguments. Its corpus comprises four institutional digital exhibition resources centered on performing-arts materials, treated as interface-based cases rather than repositories of isolated objects. The central claim is that navigation order silently establishes causal and chronological priorities. This matters because digitized scores, recordings, photographs, programs, costumes, theatrical designs, and object records do not arrive as self-interpreting evidence. Attention therefore falls on navigation paths, captions, image alternatives, metadata displays, search functions, and transitions between overview and detail.

The project's scope is narrower than a general history of digital curation. It asks how interfaces organize encounters with performance traces after musical or theatrical events are translated into images, recordings, descriptive records, and collection objects. The analysis does not equate an interface with performance itself. Instead, it studies how a digital exhibition stages relations among documentary traces and conditions what can be compared, followed, or questioned. Digital exhibition design becomes relevant to musicology and performance studies where it mediates evidence whose temporal, embodied, or event-based dimensions cannot be fully reproduced on screen.

The comparative reading advances three connected findings. First, navigation order silently establishes causal and chronological priorities. Second, accessible description can deepen interpretation when it explains relations rather than merely naming objects. Third, metadata visibility redistributes curatorial authority toward or away from users. For performing-arts materials, these findings concern whether users encounter a score before a recording, a performer before an institution, a production image before its metadata, or a thematic narrative before an underlying collection record. The argument remains proportionate to the selected cases.

The research problem has descriptive and interpretive parts. The descriptive part asks where navigation paths, captions, image alternatives, metadata displays, search functions, and transitions between overview and detail enter the resources and how their placement changes routes through performance evidence. The interpretive part asks why those changes matter for presenting music and performance rather than merely for generic web usability. Description precedes interpretation so that the conclusion is not built into observation. The contribution rests on explaining how documented interface relations shape access to performing-arts evidence, not merely on identifying common digital features.

The research question is how interface design distributes curatorial authority through navigation, description, and metadata in digital exhibitions of music and performance. The objective is to compare visible design relations without inferring user behavior from interface features alone. The article proceeds through critical context, corpus and method, three findings, discussion, limitations, and conclusion.

Digital-humanities design research supports treating an online exhibition as an argument made through navigation and display. Burdick and colleagues connect scholarly interpretation with computational and visual design [1]. Drucker's account of performative materiality explains how interface actions participate in producing, rather than merely delivering, humanistic knowledge [2]. These approaches are pertinent when a digital exhibition mediates arts ordinarily understood through duration, embodiment, sound, movement, and event.

Performance studies clarifies why digital presentation cannot be treated as a neutral substitute for live or recorded events. Auslander's account of mediatized liveness shows that technologies reshape the cultural status of performance [3]. Interpretive communities clarify why navigation cues depend on learned conventions rather than transparent access [4]. Cook's account of music as performance cautions against reducing musical meaning to the score or another textual surrogate [5]. Hayles foregrounds the coevolution of cognition and digital media [6], while Drucker's humanistic visualization theory treats displays and interfaces as knowledge-producing forms rather than neutral containers [7]. Together, these perspectives justify examining how screen-based exhibitions remediate performance evidence without claiming that an interface reproduces the event itself.

The selected materials comprise the Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room's Virtual Exhibits [8], the British Library's Discovering Music resource [9], the National Museum of American History's Smithsonian Jazz exhibition materials [10], and Europeana's Performing Arts feature [11]. These resources encompass music, opera, theatre, dance, jazz, performers, production histories, recordings, scores, images, and related documents. They are treated as interface-based cases rather than repositories of isolated objects. Selection follows conceptual variation rather than statistical representativeness, and comparison uses navigation paths, captions, image alternatives, metadata displays, search functions, and transitions between overview and detail.

The inquiry employs comparative interface reading using an accessibility-aware walkthrough protocol and a feature-to-claim analytic table. The protocol records what an interface makes available at a given step and how movement proceeds from thematic interpretation toward an item, recording, image, or collection record. The table separates interface feature, immediate relation, possible curatorial effect, and counter-reading. This procedure does not measure usability or audience response; it tests whether the interpretive propositions can be located in the visible organization of the selected resources.

To preserve disciplinary focus, the walkthrough treats musical and theatrical materials according to the evidence they can carry rather than as interchangeable digital objects. Scores document notation, recordings preserve sonic events, photographs frame bodies and spaces, programs establish production contexts, and collection records supply institutional description. The comparison asks how the interface connects these forms, not which form is intrinsically superior. This distinction prevents claims about digital access from collapsing the differences among composition, performance, documentation, preservation, and later curatorial interpretation.

Rather than counting motifs, Curating the Screen follows features through their immediate contexts and records position, recurrence, interruption, and outcome before assigning interpretive weight. Order matters because a repeated feature may retain its appearance while changing function, whereas one boundary transition may redirect the sequence. In a performing-arts exhibition, an image can begin as thematic illustration and later become evidentiary once a caption, date, performer name, production context, or catalogue record appears. Claims about intention, reception, usability, or prevalence are withheld because the method does not supply that evidence.

Source control is integral to the argument. Editions, transcriptions, reproductions, recordings, performance documents, and institutional records may preserve different aspects of the same work or event. The analysis therefore treats each identified institutional resource as the evidentiary unit. This is especially important for music and performance, where a score, sound recording, production photograph, costume, program, or oral-history excerpt can document different dimensions without being interchangeable. The argument concerns their interface relations, not a claim that one documentary form exhausts the performance it represents.

The baseline reading concerns the Library of Congress Virtual Exhibits connected to the Performing Arts Reading Room. The resource gathers exhibits drawn from Music Division materials across music, dance, theatre, opera, composers, performers, and theatrical design. The first step tests whether navigation order establishes priorities by asking how a user moves from the Performing Arts context to a named exhibit and then toward constituent materials. The concern is placement: what the interface presents as an entry point, what it postpones, and what relationships become visible only after additional navigation.

In this case, a thematic exhibit title can establish a performer, work, institution, or historical episode as the organizing frame before individual archival objects appear. Collection-level links can instead redirect attention from curatorial narrative to material record. Evidence therefore depends on sequence rather than subject matter. A route from a performing-arts category to a curated narrative and then to object-level evidence does different interpretive work from a route beginning with a searchable collection. Each ordering establishes a distinct relation among performance history, curatorial explanation, and documentary trace.

The British Library's Discovering Music tests the distributive dimension. Developed as an online music exhibition and learning resource, it brings together collection objects, recordings, manuscripts, interpretation, and contextual materials. The governing question is whether accessible description deepens interpretation by explaining relations rather than merely naming objects. The issue is not description alone, but whether descriptive text connects audible, visual, documentary, and historical evidence in ways that remain meaningful when a user cannot rely on one sensory channel.

A caption identifying a manuscript, portrait, or recording performs a cataloguing function; a description relating it to a composition, performer, performance practice, or historical setting can also perform interpretive work. Accessibility and scholarship intersect when description makes relations explicit rather than duplicating what a sighted or hearing user is presumed to perceive. The counter-reading is that descriptive differences are ordinary genre conventions. The proposition is supported only when a change in detail transfers emphasis among work, performer, object, event, and institutional record; otherwise the example remains descriptive.

The third case turns to the National Museum of American History's Smithsonian Jazz exhibition materials and gives priority to metadata visibility. Smithsonian Jazz presents online pathways focused on musicians, instruments, recordings, photographs, and jazz history. The test is whether metadata visibility redistributes curatorial authority toward or away from users. Authority here concerns whether users can move from an interpretive statement to dates, object identities, collection contexts, and records that make the statement independently traceable.

A user may first encounter a musician or instrument within an exhibition narrative and later reach object-level metadata specifying date, material, collection, or associated person. If the later record adds distinctions absent from the initial display, it can revise the earlier encounter; if it merely repeats the description, the proposition receives little support. Attention to both stages prevents later information from being projected backward as if it had been visible from the start. For jazz materials, layered access can distinguish receiving a curatorial story from examining evidence supporting it.

The concluding comparison, Europeana's Performing Arts feature, functions as a resistant comparison. Its thematic aggregation brings together stories and galleries on theatre, opera, concerts, dance, performers, venues, costumes, and related heritage from multiple contributing institutions. This federated structure differs from the more institutionally bounded cases and tests how far the propositions can travel before platform scale, aggregation, and heterogeneous metadata require qualification.

The first interpretive result is that navigation order silently establishes causal and chronological priorities. This temporal dimension matters for music and performance because interfaces sequence evidence belonging to different moments: composition, rehearsal, production, performance, recording, preservation, cataloguing, and later interpretation. The finding concerns organization, not inventory. A digital exhibition need not state a causal claim for its order to encourage one event, person, document, or institutional frame to be read as prior to another.

Across the cases, the pattern operates at several scales. A landing page establishes a thematic horizon; a menu orders subtopics; a detail page can redirect the user toward an object record; and a return to overview can revise an earlier choice. Interpretation is therefore recursive: later evidence may alter what initially appeared settled. This resembles a familiar problem in performance scholarship, where later documentation or repeated performance can transform the meaning attached to an earlier event without erasing its historical position.

The proposition is strongest where navigation elements do more than recur. An occurrence must be prepared by an expectation and alter what follows. Identical images, names, recordings, objects, or interface elements may carry different force when structural position changes. A performer image on a thematic page, for example, is not equivalent to the same image reached through a collection record supplying date, photographer, production, and provenance. This criterion ties digital exhibition design to sequence instead of treating visibility alone as proof.

The next result proposes that accessible description can deepen interpretation when it explains relations rather than merely naming objects. Performing-arts collections make the issue visible because evidence may be divided among sound, notation, moving image, still photography, costume, instrument, program, stage design, and textual documentation. An accessible interface cannot reproduce every sensory or embodied dimension of performance, but description can clarify how such traces relate to one another and to the event they document.

The second proposition asks who or what receives the interpretive force identified in the first. Position is inseparable from access: a voice, instrument, performer, object, space, or interface option has force partly because it can initiate, interrupt, answer, or redirect the sequence. The analysis traces this allocation through captions, image alternatives, contextual prose, metadata, and transitions between overview and detail. The hierarchy is inferred from a descriptive element's capacity to redirect subsequent interpretation, including cases where a peripheral caption or field proves more consequential than central exhibition prose.

Metadata visibility redistributes curatorial authority toward or away from users. Metadata is not self-explanatory or automatically emancipatory; its effect depends on placement, legibility, and connection to the exhibition narrative. A visible date, creator, performer, venue, object identifier, collection name, or rights statement can permit a user to test a curatorial association, while buried or disconnected metadata can leave the narrative comparatively closed. The relevant question is whether metadata changes what can be investigated after the initial encounter.

The findings form a sequence. The first identifies a process directing attention. The second shows how attention and interpretive access are distributed. The third explains how later evidence can revise that distribution. Navigation, description, and metadata are analytically separable but operate together as users move among exhibition narrative, performance trace, and institutional record. This supports the central thesis that interface rhetoric is formally organized and historically consequential for digital performing-arts curation.

The third proposition is tested retrospectively. Subsequent evidence must change the status of something already encountered; repetition is insufficient. The analysis therefore rereads prior captions, images, recordings, object descriptions, metadata displays, and transitions after returns or altered frames. Where later information changes the relation among work, performer, event, document, or collection, authority has been redistributed; where the prior interpretation remains unaffected, the claim loses explanatory force.

The three propositions alter one another. If navigation order establishes causal and chronological priorities, accessible description cannot be treated as a separate theme; it helps determine who or what remains intelligible within the ordered sequence. Metadata visibility adds a further test by asking whether later information confirms, narrows, or overturns an earlier inference. Curating the Screen therefore explains digital exhibition design through ordered dependence rather than a list of recurring devices. For music and performance, this matters because interfaces connect documents preserving different aspects of an event and easily mistaken for interchangeable representations.

The comparative result is that accessibility is part of scholarly method because interfaces adjudicate which relations can be perceived and tested. This does not mean that an accessible feature is automatically interpretively rich or that more metadata always produces better scholarship. The narrower claim is that when description and metadata reveal relations left implicit by the primary display, they enlarge the evidentiary path available to inquiry. When those relations remain unavailable, the interface may concentrate interpretive authority in the curatorial narrative even if the underlying collection is extensive.

Counter-reading is used as an analytical control. For navigation order, the strongest alternative explains the sequence as convenience, convention, or platform inheritance rather than curatorial rhetoric. The accessibility proposition must show why relational explanation, rather than textual abundance, accounts for the contrast. The metadata proposition is tested by asking what later record would have to be absent for the interpretation to remain unchanged. These tests make disagreement local and answerable instead of treating every design decision as evidence of intention.

The intervention is not the discovery of an unnoticed interface motif. Its contribution is to specify how digital exhibition design operates when the same performing-arts evidence changes function through sequence. A recording may begin as illustration and later become an object of comparison; a production photograph may shift from atmosphere to dated evidence; a program or score may acquire significance once performer, venue, or collection metadata becomes visible. Connecting these changes to position and outcome turns a broad observation about digital curation into a claim evaluable case by case.

This distinction also changes the status of absence. The article does not treat a missing recording, description, transition, metadata field, performance document, or participant as evidence unless the interface first establishes a relevant expectation. An omission matters only when surrounding organization shows how it changes an established relation. For example, absent object-level metadata is analytically significant only if the exhibition invites an item to function as evidence whose identity or context would affect interpretation. Negative evidence must be locatable, relational, and consequential.

The principal limitation is that interfaces change over time, while this article does not reconstruct every historical state of the four resources. Its comparative reading concerns the identifiable institutional resources and interface relations described here. It does not establish reception, institutional intention, prevalence across digital performing-arts exhibitions, or causal effects on users. Nor does it evaluate the quality of underlying performances or collections. Formal reading of interface architecture cannot substitute for usability testing, audience research, archival production records, or institutional interviews.

This inquiry examined how digital exhibitions of music and performing arts turn interface choices into historical and interpretive arguments. Comparative interface reading supported three connected claims: navigation order establishes causal and chronological priorities; accessible description can deepen interpretation when it explains relations rather than merely naming objects; and metadata visibility redistributes curatorial authority toward or away from users. Together, they produce a relational account in which performance documents, curatorial narratives, and collection records acquire significance through ordered presentation.

Conflict of Interest. The authors declare that they have no financial or non-financial conflicts of interest relevant to this work.

Funding. The authors declare that this research received no external funding.

Data and Materials Availability. No new data were created or analysed in this study, and therefore data sharing is not applicable.

Ethics and Consent. This study did not involve human participants, animals, or identifiable personal data; therefore, ethics approval and informed consent were not required.

Author Contributions. All authors contributed to the conception, development, analysis, writing, and revision of the manuscript and approved the final version and author order.

Generative Artificial Intelligence. No substantive generative artificial-intelligence assistance was used in the scientific content, analysis, results, or conclusions of this work.

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