Next Steps–Future Projects?
Can you imagine a repertory you’d like to see treated in this way in the months and years to come? Tell us something about it. How defined? What problems of access to originals? What audiences? Possibilities for pedagogical or research uses? Performance?
What new tools would you like to see developed for searching, displaying, and sharing?
February 5th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Of course, I’d love to see images of sources attached to my motet database. A Mass database would be incredibly useful. Ultimately, I’d like to see a database that simply inventories sources, so that we would not be restricted by genres. I wish I had included Masses in my database.
One of the questions we have to address as we make data available, and one that I’ve wrestled with, is whether to provide raw data (the choice I ultimately made) or digested scholarship on that data. Of course, the answer to that question depends a great deal on who we perceive our audience to be. I think scholars prefer to have data that they can interpret for themselves. Students and non-specialists need data that has been interpreted and processed. I have found that simply providing and refining raw data is a full-time job, and the less we try to interpret it, the more actual data we can provide.
The scholarly databases now available take a variety of approaches; I’m not sure there is any one correct answer. Embarking on a project like this involves making a long-term commitment to maintenance and development. Projects like Digital Du Chemin provide a model for others who wish to take a similar defined and focused set of sources and treat them in similar depth.
One of the other considerations in defining the data to be presented is the conformity of all the available data to some manageable set of criteria. In my project, which inventories over 1400 sources, I had to provide enough fields to cover all reasonable types of data without overwhelming the user. I have been in the process for several years of converting to a 40 field format (from 19). I am worried about overwhelming users! And in trying to cover all contingencies, we end up with many empty data cells. But when we expanded our data set to include repertory of the 14th and 15th centuries, we had to provide fields appropriate for those repertories.
March 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
There are, of course, other early music digitizing projects underway – DIAMM and CMME for example, and I understand the Alamire Foundation is launching something to do with the Alamire manuscripts. What can this initiative learn from them?