RISM at the Music Encoding Conference, Florence, Italy
Jennifer Ward
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
I (Jennifer Ward) attended the Music Encoding Conference in Florence, Italy, from 18-20 May 2015. The full program included 19 presentations and 11 poster sessions.
The Music Encoding Conference was organized by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), a scholarly community whose main project is creating musical documents that are machine-readable. MEI has been used in many projects, including the Lost Voices Project and Beethovens Werkstatt, which we reported on in this space, and the latter of which was at the conference.
It was interesting to hear about ways in which RISM data were being used in various projects, since the data are available as linked open data under a CC license. At RISM Switzerland, for example, our colleagues Rodolfo Zitellini and Laurent Pugin are working on expressing MARC with MEI. Here they hope to make the data more visible behind MARC, since not everyone can “read” MARC records. They have a demo of converting Plaine & Easie code to MEI on Verovio.org.
A paper by Kristina Richts and Irmlind Capelle reported on the Detmold Court Theatre Project, an aim of which is to determine whether MEI is a viable means of cataloging music manuscripts (and they are using TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative, to encode archival text documents such as lists of artists’ fees and account books). For the manuscripts, they have taken RISM records and are adding information to expand on details only hinted at in RISM, such as crossed-out sections or differences in partbooks. It is hoped that the enhanced RISM data can be sent back to the RISM catalog after the conclusion of this project, but exact details still need to be worked out. For those going to the IAML congress in New York, Richts and Peter Stadler will describe the workflow in more detail at the RISM session on Thursday, June 25.
Research by Stadler and Richts appeared in a different constellation in a presentation about a digital thematic catalog of Carl Maria von Weber’s works. Slides are available online. The Max Reger Institute was also present to discuss the hybrid edition of Max Reger’s organ works, with close attention to manuscripts and early printed editions. We also heard about updates from the Josquin Research Project by Craig Stuart Sapp and Jesse Rodin, and ways of using MEI for lute music by David Lewis, Richard Lewis, and Tim Crawford. The MEI customizations for Transforming Musicology are available on GitHub. Giuliano Di Bacco and Perry Roland are looking into MEI for mensural notation in the Thesaurus musicarum latinarum project at Indiana University. So many of the presentations at this conference seemed to touch on areas that RISM focuses on, and I hope that we can increase our cooperation with projects like these in the future.
Links to other presentations and projects:
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GNU LilyPond and music encoding (Urs Liska, Mike Solomon, Peter Bjuhr) Paper available online
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A specification for addressing encoded music on the web (Raffaele Viglianti) The Enhancing Music Notation Addressability (EMA) project
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Cross-platform music notation with SMuFL and MEI (Andrew Hankinson, Andrew Horwitz, Laurent Pugin) Slides online Questions for discussion
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A browser-based MEI editor (Andrew Horwitz, Andrew Hankinson, Ichiro Fujinaga) MEIX on GitHub
The next conference will be held at McGill University in 2016. Discussion about MEI takes place throughout the year on the mailing list, MEI-L.
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