Files List

• Big (Work) Data. Making and Using MEI for Composers’ Digital Work Catalogues  
  In category: collaboration, community, datasets, digital work catalogues, metadata.
  Uploaded by Kristina Richts-Matthaei on 25 November 2023.

  AUTHORS: Gammert, Jonathan / Neumann, Joshua / Richts-Matthaei, Kristina
ABSTRACT:
  Interrogating any source philologically requires first the collection or creation and curation of data, whether analogue or digital. This praxis requires increasingly interdisciplinary methodologies as musicology continues its digital turn—methodologies that are most quickly applied to a project through collaboration. A natural output of such projects undertaken at the scale of collected works is a catalogue documenting metadata, which account for an author’s or composer’s output. These catalogues can also establish intellectual histories of these corpora and, for major figures, (i.e. – those with voluminous works and expressions or manifestations thereof), they establish paradigms of what constitutes “Big Data” in these fields.
Moreover, they invite examination of the terminology used. Is it simply “Data” and “Metadata” that researchers can enrich through authority data? Does it expand to some other qualifier such as “Big Data,” “Deep Data,” or “Broad Data,” even with the various challenges inherent to each? However one qualifies these datasets can understandably affect the ways in which creators, curators, and users interact with them. Considerations in this regard, combined with assessment of the nature of the dataset in question, whether extant or projected, and design thinking practices of end-user/stakeholder input lead to individually tailored solutions.
Two collaboratively born datasets are currently in progress in the context of NFDI4Culture, the national Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage in Germany. Each one focuses on (research) data management, metadata, documentation, and digital transformation. One collaboration in early stages is creating conceptual and digital infrastructures for the transformation of metadata for the works of Georg Philipp Telemann. A unique challenge in this interdisciplinary cooperation is how to handle, at a fundamental level, a myriad of idiosyncrasies unique 18th-century compositional praxis as they emerge in Telemann’s c. 5,000 works. This project establishes the digital infrastructure through the Metadata editor and repository for MEI data (MerMEId) for the online Telemann catalogue, which will soon be published in phases by the Telemann-Zentrum Magdeburg. Another dataset, nearing publication in Radar4Culture, contains approximately 33,000 files (c. 3,000 work files and c. 30,000 source files) resulting from the Joseph Haydn Werke. Collaboration was essential in this project to preserve data contents while transforming from a single-use schema into MEI.
These datasets, primarily comprised of metadata, constitute two contributions of value for musicologists and the MEI and TEI communities. The poster presents a collaborative approach to data transformation into MEI from previous formats, addresses specific challenges associated therewith, and highlights a cooperation model that actively contributes to broader digital philology communities of text and music.

• Transitional MerMEId – Responding to Community Needs in Software and Sustainability  
  In category: community driven software development, digital work catalogues, metadata, sustainability.
  Uploaded by Kristina Richts-Matthaei on 30 October 2023.

  AUTHORS: Bue, Margrethe / Gammert, Jonathan / Gubsch, Clemens / Jettka, Daniel / Kolb, Severin / Lewis, David / Neumann, Joshua / Richter, Matthias / Richts-Matthaei, Kristina / Stadler, Peter
  ABSTRACT:
  MerMEId is an established – and the only – tool in digital musicology that has been developed explicitly for creating and managing musical catalogue data in MEI. Its use in varied projects worldwide evinces its broad applicability. The MerMEId community regularly receives requests from musicological projects (catalogues, editions, etc.) that would like to use the tool for their specific needs and workflows. As such, a significant demand exists within the community for a stable and flexible MEI metadata editor. Originally developed as an in-house solution at the Danish Center for Music Editing, MerMEId has transitioned into a community driven, open-source project coordinated by Virtueller Forschungsverbund Edirom (ViFE) and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH). While the change in governance – along with the establishment of platforms for regular communication and exchange – can be considered completed, the code basis of the software needs extensive revision for re-usability and sustainability.
  Currently identified areas for updating include: more maintainable and modularized software, broad and nuanced testing (unit tests, regression tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, performance tests), and better documentation for users and developers. Contextualized within an accounting of projects using the MerMEId and a review of its current functionality, this poster highlights these planned revisions and outlines a proposed infrastructure for enhancing sustainability. These changes aim to enhance usability and user-friendliness, thereby solidifying the MerMEId as the preeminent tool for creating digital catalogues.
  These issues need substantial work that goes beyond the voluntary work of contributors from the community.

• Five Aspects of ViFE – Organizing cooperation across project boundaries  
  In category: community, infrastructure, Text and Music.
  Uploaded by Andreas Münzmay on 27 October 2023.

  AUTHORS: Albrecht-Hohmaier, Martin / Capelle, Irmlind / Herold, Kristin / Kepper, Johannes / Münzmay, Andreas / Obert, Salome / Richts-Matthaei, Kristina / Saccomano, Mark / Seipelt, Agnes / Stadler, Peter / Ried, Dennis

  ABSTRACT:
  The Virtual Research Group Edirom (Virtueller Forschungsverbund Edirom, ViFE) is an association of current and former staff of the Detmold/Paderborn Department of Musicology involved in projects advancing digital methods in musicology. With more than 25 researchers currently involved in around a dozen different projects, ViFE is a major player in musicological Digital Humanities.
  ##A Knowledge Sharing Group

  The fundamental idea of ViFE is to be a group of experts in constant collaboration. Together, the expertise of ViFE members adds up to over 100 years of experience in digital music editions, ranging from computer science to philology and music history, from project management to Digital Humanities and information science – shared through weekly meetings and regular workshops within our group.
  ##Research Projects

  ViFE is named after the Edirom project, funded from 2006 to 2012. ViFE is involved in long-term projects, including Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe and Beethovens Werkstatt, but also has completed, or currently works on, several short-term projects and is constantly developing new project proposals.
  ##Standards

  ViFE has been deeply involved in both the TEI and MEI communities for many years. We continue to actively connect our research with others and apply our findings to the development of these encoding standards.
  ##Education and Training

  Since 2010, ViFE has organized the annual Edirom Summer School, one of the most important venues for learning MEI. Members of ViFE are also involved in Master’s programs on Digital Music Philology and on Digital Humanities at Paderborn University and supervise doctoral dissertations.
  ##Cooperation

  Our group is a vital part of NFDI4Culture and partners with many other institutions, such as Mainz Academy of Science and Literature, cemfi, CDMD, RISM, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, SLUB Dresden, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, BSB Munich, University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, and several German universities.

• Notation editor for transcribing Hindustani Classical music ‘Bandish’  
  In category: non-western script, Text and Music.
  Uploaded by Kiran Ramakant Karkera on 26 October 2023.

  In this paper we present the Bhatkhande Bandish editor, a notation editor for transcribing Hindustani (North Indian classical music) compositions known as Bandish in a traditional notation system known as Bhatkhande notation.

  Hindustani classical music (HCM) is a traditional form of music practiced in the Indian subcontinent. In this paper, we describe a web-based notation editor capable of transcribing and rendering a Bandish in a traditional notation system, named the Bhatkhande notation system

  This editor is an open-source alternative to proprietary notation editors (Sawant n.d.) (SwarClassical n.d.). It offers two artifacts:

  - An open file format specification to store a Bandish document.
  - An open-source engine to render a Bandish on a web page.

  Additionally, making the project open source allows community contributions for Raga and Taal metadata which makes it easier to support new Ragas and Taals. It also makes it possible to support new Indic languages to display the notations in.

• Presentation slides for "An annotation model for software mentions and citations"  
  In category: encoding challenges, Pointers, Annotation, Overlapping.
  Uploaded by Daniel Jettka on 26 October 2023.

  Authors: Alvares Freire, Fernanda / Ferger, Anne / Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike / Jettka, Daniel

  ABSTRACT

  Appropriate citation of software plays an important role in academic publications to make research results reproducible and reusable. There are several recommendations and guidelines on how to deal with research software (Anzt et al. 2021; Smith et al. 2016; Lamprecht et al. 2020) and how to cite software that is used in the research process (Jackson n.d.; Chue Hong et al. 2019a, 2019b; Druskat 2021a, 2021b).

  To find out if these recommendations (e.g. consistent versioning, persistent identification, appropriate credit to developers) are actually reflected in practice, we examined conference abstracts of the DHd (Henny-Krahmer/Jettka 2022) and ADHO conferences (Jettka et al., to appear). Apparently, there is great potential (and need) for improving the current situation. In our software citation studies, an annotation model was formulated in the form of a TEI taxonomy. Initially, a document-centered approach was pursued, i.e., software mentions were semi-automatically identified and directly annotated with citation information that could be located somewhere else in the document, for instance, in the bibliographies of the abstracts.

  We now propose a revised TEI annotation model, which aims at a more precise annotation to differentiate between pure software mentions (names) and other parts of citation information (such as URLs, developers, or bibliography entries) and linking these parts together. In our new approach, we use pointers () to an externally defined list of software entities and reference these pointers from the annotation instances of corresponding citation information. Thus we still aim at examining the current situation of software citation (this time in articles of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative), but at the same time, we provide and use a model and create a data basis of software mentions and citations which could be used for training of automatic methods to identify software mentions and corresponding citation information in academic texts.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anzt, Hartwig / Bach, Felix / Druskat, Stephan / Löffler, Frank / Loewe, Axel / Renard, Bernhard Y. / Seemann, Gunnar / Struck, Alexander et al. (2021): “An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action [version 2; peer review: 2 approved].” In: F1000Research 9:295. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.23224.2.

  Chue Hong, Neil (ed.) (2019a): “Software Citation Checklist for Authors” (Version 0.9.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3479199.

  Chue Hong, Neil (ed.) (2019b): “Software Citation Checklist for Developers” (Version 0.9.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3482769.

  Druskat, Stephan (2021a): “Research software citation for researchers.” Research Software Citation. Cite and Make Citable! (Version 1.1). https://cite.research-software.org/researchers/ [last accessed: 04.11.2022].

  Druskat, Stephan (2021b): “Research software citation for developers.” Research Software Citation. Cite and Make Citable! (Version 1.1). https://cite.research-software.org/developers [last accessed: 04.11.2022].

  Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike / Daniel Jettka (2022): “Softwarezitation als Technik der Wissenschaftskultur. Vom Umgang mit Forschungssoftware in den Digital Humanities.” In: DHd 2022. Kulturen des digitalen Gedächtnisses. Konferenzabstracts, Potsdam, 7.-11.3.2022. Potsdam: Universität Potsdam, 203-206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6328047.

  Jackson, Mike (n. d.): “How to cite and describe software.” In: Software and research: The Software Sustainability Institute’s Blog. https://www.software.ac.uk/how-cite-and-describe-software [last accessed: 04.11.2021].

  Jettka, Daniel / Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike / Ferger, Anne / Alvares Freire, Fernanda (to appear): “Software Citation in the Digital Humanities”. In: DH 2023. Collaboration as Opportunity. Conference abstracts, Graz, 10.-14.7.2023.

  Lamprecht, Anna-Lena / Garcia, Leyla / Kuzak, Mateusz / Martinez, Carlos / Arcila, Ricardo /Del Pico, Eva M. / Dominguez Del Angel, Victoria et al. (2020): “Towards FAIR principles for research software.” In: Data Science 3 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3233/DS-190026.

  Smith, Arfon M. / Katz, Daniel S. / Niemeyer, Kyle E. / FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group (2016): “Software citation principles.” In: PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86.

• Presentation slides for "Building sustainable infrastructure for scholarly communities  
  In category: infrastructure.
  Uploaded by Anne Ferger on 18 October 2023.

  Best practices for empowering research with collaboration in the TEI and MEI context using XGarage
  Authors: Stadler, Peter / Ferger, Anne

  ABSTRACT

  While the long term preservation and availability of research data has already seen some discussion and solutions, the sustainability of research software and research infrastructures is still less discussed. It mostly depends on individual institutions and people that bring together the technical, social, and economic (i.e. funding) requirements. The paper discusses the development of the TEIGarage/MEIGarage and its service availability as a model for sustainable infrastructure in scholarly communities, especially highlighting the need of building communities for and collaborating on maintaining research software infrastructures and the advantages of virtualisation and central deployment.

  The popular term of sustainability often means the environmental factor, but there is also economic and social sustainability (see Sverdrup and Svensson 2005 and Venters et al. 2014). Ecological sustainability for research software and infrastructure (e.g. green computing) is recently discussed in the context of Digital Humanities (see Baillot et al.), and while we will not focus on this aspect here, we consider it a crucial aspect. In the context of research software and infrastructure technical sustainability is the most widely discussed factor, but economic/financial and organizational sustainability and funding also play a crucial role. The practical question we want to discuss in this abstract is how the “Garage” infrastructure can be sustained in the best way.

  TEIGarage1 and MEIGarage2 (formerly OxGarage) is a long-living software project used in various contexts (see e.g. Stadler et al. 2022). The software offers a framework for community specific data processing.

  Allowing for collaboration on the framework as well as on its maintenance and deployment as a service are crucial for tackling the workload in small research communities such as the TEI and MEI communities. With their open and general framework the Garages offer infrastructure for scholarly communities.3 While the Text Encoding Initiative constituted itself as an infrastructure (see Burnard 2013), the Garage framework represents a technical form of infrastructure.

  A central deployment of research software offers multiple benefits as opposed to local installations, especially in the light of sustainable and reproducible research. A central low-threshold interface enables scholars without technical expertise to exploit the functionality, e.g. students. By offering a reliable API endpoint further tools can easily build on the services (see e.g. Roma4). One central deployment of the software also ensures the reproducibility of the e. g. conversion which increases the traceability of the research. In the case of TEIGarage and MEIGarage this also means the utilized Guidelines and Stylesheets can be retraced.

  But these benefits don’t come without costs. Resources such as hardware and basic software infrastructure are needed for container orchestration and virtualisation, as well as maintainers for the infrastructure. This also means work on the software apart from the code base, but on its virtualisation and containerisation.

  To be able to cover these costs as small research communities, forces need to be joined. In the example of the TEIGarage and MEIGarage not only the underlying framework can be reworked collaboratively, also the centralized deployment and virtualisation can be combined. A facilitating factor is the technical sustainability of the code the software is based on. Sustainable code and software does ideally need less resources for maintenance. Measures have been taken for the Garage framework to become more sustainable and FAIR in the sense of Hasselbring et al. (2020), Anzt et al. (2021) and Hong et al. (2022).

  In conclusion and from our practical experience, costs (working hours as well as software and hardware costs) need to be shared between small research communities for software to be sustained over a long period of time.

  Bibliography

  Anzt, H. et al. (2021) ‘An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action’. F1000Research. Available at: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.23224.2.

  Baillot, Anne et al.: „Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis. A Manifesto“, Foregrounding the Climate Crisis Within Digital Humanities Work, https://dhc-barnard.github.io/dhclimate/ (accessed 24.04.2023).

  Burnard, L. (2013) ‘The Evolution of the Text Encoding Initiative: From Research Project to Research Infrastructure’, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Preprint], (Issue 5). Available at: https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.811.

  Hasselbring, W. et al. (2020) ‘From FAIR research data toward FAIR and open research software’, it - Information Technology, 62(1), pp. 39–47. Available at: https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/itit-2019-0040.

  Hong, N.P.C. et al. (2022) FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles). Available at: https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00065.

  Penzenstadler, B. (2013) ‘Towards a definition of sustainability in and for software engineering’, in Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (SAC ’13), pp. 1183–1185. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480585.

  Stadler, Peter, Ferger, Anne and Röwenstrunk, Daniel (2022) ‘From OxGarage to TEIGarage and MEIGarage’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.7061525.

  Sverdrup, H. and Svensson, M.G.E. (2005) ‘Defining the Concept of Sustainability - a Matter of Systems Thinking and Applied Systems Analysis’, in M.-O. Olsson and G. Sjöstedt (eds) Systems Approaches and Their Application: Examples from Sweden. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 143–164. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2370-7_6.

  Venters, C. C. et al. (2014) ‘Software Sustainability: The Modern Tower of Babel’, RE4SuSy: Third International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems. Edited by B. Penzenstadler, M. Mahaux, and C. Salinesi. CEUR. Available at: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/84941/.

  Notes

  1. https://teigarage.tei-c.org/

  2. https://meigarage.edirom.de/

  3. While this currently means the MEI and TEI communities, there will hopefully be further Garages by further research communities.

  4. Both “Romaantiqua” (https://romaantiqua.tei-c.org/) and the new “Roma” at https://roma.tei-c.org/ (also known as “RomaJS” or “Romabeta”) use TEIGarage (formerly OxGarage) as backend.

• Interoperability of Text and Image in the Digital Edition of the Wenceslas Bible [POSTER]  
  In category: Text-Image-Correlation.
  Uploaded by Oleksii Sapov-Erlinger on 11 October 2023.

  The Wenceslas Bible, created for the Bohemian King Wenceslas IV. around 1390-1400, is the first largely complete German-language translation of the Hebrew Bible after the Latin Vulgate, combined with elaborate and highly valuable illustrations. Therefore, it is one of the most precious cultural heritage objects of the Austrian National Library. The Bible contains six codices (Cod. 2759-2764) with 1214 parchment leaves featuring 654 main and countless marginal miniatures. The text of the Bible translation is of the highest interest for philologist and eminently significant in terms of cultural history, as it is integrated into the religious reform movements of the 14th century and must be seen in connection with the so-called Austrian Bible translator, the work of Jan Hus but also the English Wycliffite translation.

  The Wenceslas Bible – Digital Edition and Analysis is a joint project of the University of Salzburg and the Austrian National Library, financed by the Federal State of Salzburg. It aims to create a TEI based edition with a focus on the investigation of the text-image correlations. As a first step, the project has launched a prototype (https://edition.onb.ac.at/wenbibel) for the book Genesis in June offering a synoptic view for transcription and the facsimile. Further parts will be published continuously, including a revised text with editorial comments as well as a description and analysis of the illustrations including their relation to the text.

  The poster will delineate the primary goals of the project as well as the significant difficulties related to the process and compatibility of text modification and digital picture encoding. A section of the display will exhibit the TEI model implemented to connect the two edition tiers and the necessary connections that must be established throughout. It underscores the cross-disciplinary nature of the edition, encompassing methodologies from philology, art history, and Digital Humanities, with a particular emphasis on the methodical correlation between text and image, and its digital portrayal.

• Brainstorming on the Encoding of Eastern Neumes: Middle-Byzantine Notation as a Case-Study  
  In category: encoding challenges, non-western script.
  Uploaded by Elsa De Luca on 9 October 2023.

  Authors: De Luca, Elsa / Alexandru, Maria / Fujinaga, Ichiro
  ABSTRACT
  The effort to encode neumatic notations has primarily focused on Western European repertories, with little attention given to the neumes employed in the East. To address this gap, we propose to apply our knowledge of the MEI Neumes Module and Eastern notations to raise awareness on some methodological issues that have hindered modern scholars from encoding Eastern neumes. Our case study is the Middle Byzantine notation, employed from the mid-12th-century to about 1815 across a large geographical area encompassing mainly Eastern Europe and part of the Middle East. This notation has been chosen since it has many points of contacts with Western notations but, at the same time, its basics differ radically from what we encounter in the West.

  In the East, music scripts are of the ‘articulatory’ type, serving as a guide on how to make music, almost similar to a tablature style of notation. In Western notation the performance is captured mostly within the neume. In the East notation is context sensitive and its interpretation depends on different factors, such as the genre and style of melopoeia, the mode, the melodic formula, the place within the musical phrase, the poetic text, and the liturgical frame. This fundamental difference has also an impact on the kind and number of signs employed in the notations. Middle-Byzantine notation offers an impressive number of combinations and positioning of signs including neumes that provide specific interval information and subsidiary or cheironomic signs indicating the musical ‘Gestaltung’, which implies rhythmical properties, grouping, and phrasing of the interval signs, dynamics, ethos of the formulas, as well as different levels of ornamentation and melodic expansion, according to the context. Possibly, the most difficult feature to be captured in the encoding of Middle-Byzantine notation is the relative position of the signs in the notational space; indeed, their relative positioning (above, below, next) can change the overall interpretation of all the related signs.

  When considering the graphical appearance and semantic of neumes, we should adopt both approaches to the encoding of Middle-Byzantine notation. It is crucial to be able to capture in the encoding even the finest details because this notation is very precise and conveys musical meaning through the tiniest graphical feature. On the other hand, encoding the semantic of the neumes should remain possible and open since, besides the basic intervallic structure of the pieces, the other dimensions of the music have to be interpreted in the light of oral tradition. Therefore, it would be desirable to include information on historically informed practice, which is available through musical treatises, manuscripts, and the oral tradition of Byzantine Chant. Middle-Byzantine neumes are therefore rich in metadata and their encoding should also include the names of the neumes in Greek, possibly with transliteration, translation, and etymology.

  We hope that our presentation can actively contribute to the ongoing discussions on encoding of non-Western early notations, particularly the Middle-Byzantine notation, and encourage a collaborative effort to find the most effective way to encode Eastern neumes.

  Bibliography
  De Luca, Elsa, and Haig Utidjian. 2023. Challenging the MEI Neumes Module: Encoding Armenian Neumes. In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, Dalhousie University, 19–22 May 2022, ed. by Jennifer Bain and David M. Weigl. Forthcoming.

  De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, and Sarah Ann Long. 2019. Capturing Early Notations in MEI: The Case of Old Hispanic Neumes. MusikTheorie-Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3: 229–49.

  De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, and Sarah Ann Long. 2019. Cantus Ultimus’ MEI Neume Module and its Interoperability Across Chant Notations. Abstract. Music Encoding Conference, Vienna. Available at https://music-encoding.org/conference/abstracts/abstracts_mec2019/MEI%202019_De%20Luca%20et%20alii.pdf.

  Alexandru, Maria. 2017. Paleography of Byzantine Music: Scientifc and artistic quests (in Greek: Παλαιογραφία Βυζαντινής Μουσικής. Επιστημονικές και καλλιτεχνικές αναζητήσεις). Athens: Hellenic Academic Ebooks. https://repository.kallipos.gr/handle/11419/6487

  Siklafidis, Nikolaos, and Maria Alexandru. 2022. Font Design of Psaltic (Byzantine) Notation for Greek Musical Repertories. In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, Alicante 2021. (poster και αντίστοιχο κείμενο): https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:46011/ (3.12.2022).

  Troelsgård. Christian. 2011. Byzantine Neumes. Α Νew Introduction to the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation. MMB, Subsidia IX. Copenhagen: Tusculanum Press.

• Encoding Transcultural Texts - Applying TEI to Early Modern Chinese Christian Literature  
  In category: non-western script.
  Uploaded by Wenlu Wang on 3 October 2023.

  This project centers on data modeling and encoding of early modern Chinese Christian literature. It demonstrates the effectiveness of structuring and encoding these texts in TEI-XML for accumulating and analyzing Chinese Christian text data, as well as contributes to the discussion on developing models for encoding and linking transcultural texts.

• Visual or Symbolic? Best Practices for Encoding Neumes  
  In category: encoding challenges.
  Uploaded by Elsa De Luca on 3 October 2023.

  Authors: De Luca, Elsa / Behrendt, Inga / Fujinaga, Ichiro / Helsen, Kate / Morent, Stefan

  ABSTRACT
  A general standard practice in MEI music encoding is to capture the meaning of the music symbols rather than their graphic appearance. While this philosophy is suitable for modern notations, it does not necessarily apply to the encoding of neumes. Early notations (9th – 13th century) conveyed a different set of musical instructions from what we are used to seeing in modern notation because it existed primarily in an oral tradition.

  The original meaning of early music scripts is, to various degrees, lost. Early music palaeographers (Atkinson, Treitler, Rankin, among others) managed to pin down some principles behind the various music scripts employed across Europe and part of the Middle East and the Levant. Broadly speaking, the meaning originally attributed to the neumes depended on their graphical appearance (e.g., a vertical stroke mirroring a raising melody) and/or on some conventions established and shared by the scribes and readers familiar with that specific music script. The quantity of musical information conveyed by the neumes to modern readers varies according to the style of the music script. As such, the music encoding of early music scripts requires, on one hand, a system flexible enough to capture musical information unclear to the modern reader (e.g., a rising melody, even though the size of the interval is unknown). On the other hand, it should be able to express something (e.g., a neume) whose original meaning is now lost and the only thing left is a recognizable pen-stroke found repeatedly in the sources.

  Recently some historical musicologists proposed some changes to improve the MEI Neumes Module applicability to different kinds of early notations. One of the specific challenges they faced was the difficulty of encoding potentially meaningful visual aspects of the neumes in the current MEI system without being certain of the semantic—musical meaning. Existing MEI schemas will need to be expanded to include several new attributes and elements in order to properly capture the rich graphical variety founds in early music scripts.

  This paper proposal aims to bridge the gap between semantic and graphic uses of MEI. We will present a case study highlighting the decision-making process behind some of the changes that will be suggested in the near future to the current MEI Neumes Module. By discussing some neumes in St Gall notation, we aim to contribute to the wider discussion about best practices for the encoding of neumes and, more broadly, to the digital representation of music. Hopefully this paper will give an insight on the laborious process, and specific expertise, required to encode neumes and contribute towards the conversation about the encoding of non-Western music notations. We wish to raise awareness on the peculiarity of neumatic notations within the bigger picture of musical scores and to foster dialogue within the MEI community and beyond, to find together the best system to encode neumes.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY
  Bain, Jennifer, Inga Behrendt, and Kate Helsen. 2014. “Linienlose Neumen und ihre Repräsentation mit MEI Schema, Herausforderungen in der Arbeit im Optical Neume Recognition Project (ONRP).” Digitale Rekonstruktionen mittelalterlicher Bibliotheken. Edited by Sabine Philippi and Philipp Vanscheidt. Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 12: 119–132.

  Behrendt, Inga, Jennifer Bain, and Kate Helsen. 2017. “MEI Kodierung der frühesten Notation in linienlosen Neumen.” Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter 4 / Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age. Vol. 4. Edited by Hannah Busch, Franz Fischer, and Patrick Sahle, with the cooperation of Philip Hegel and Celiz Krause, Norderstedt 2016. Köln: Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik e.V, 2017, 281–296.

  De Luca, Elsa, and Haig Utidjian. 2023. “Challenging the MEI Neumes Module: Encoding Armenian Neumes.” In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, Dalhousie University, 19–22 May 2022, ed. by Jennifer Bain and David M. Weigl. Forthcoming.

  De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, Sarah Ann Long. 2019. “Capturing Early Notations in MEI: The Case of Old Hispanic Neumes.” MusikTheorie-Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3: 229–249.

  De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, and Sarah Ann Long. “Cantus Ultimus’ MEI Neume Module and its Interoperability Across Chant Notations.” Abstract. Music Encoding Conference, Vienna. Available at https://music-encoding.org/conference/abstracts/abstracts_mec2019/MEI%202019_De%20Luca%20et%20alii.pdf

  Helsen, Kate, Inga Behrendt, and Jennifer Bain. 2017. “A Morphology of Medieval Notations in the Optical Neume Recognition Project.” Arti musices: Croatian Musicological Review 48/2: 241–266. https://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&id_clanak_jezik=284211

  Hoppe, Paul, and Stefan Morent. 2021. “Computergestützte Tools zur Codierung des Gregorianischen Chorals. Ein neuer Eingabe-Editor für das MEI neumes-module.” Schaffen und Nachahmen. Kreative Prozesse im Mittelalter, hrsg. v. Volker Leppin unter Mitarbeit von Samuel J. Raiser (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 16), Berlin und Boston 2021, 555–560.

  Morent, Stefan, Fabian Köninger, and Niels Pfefffer 2023. MEI Neumes Workspace. https://www.digimuwi.uni-tuebingen.de/neumes-workspace/

  Morent, Stefan. 2011. “Digitalisierungskonzepte für Neumen-Notationen - die Projekte TüBingen und e-sequence.” Perspektiven Digitaler Musikedition. Die Tonkunst 3: 277–283.

• Poster: Text Encoding without //text. The use of //abstract as means to avoid the one-dimensionality of ego-networks in ›Buber-Correspondences Digital‹ project  
  In category: correspondence, encoding challenges, Entity-relationship model.
  Uploaded by Thomas Kollatz on 28 September 2023.

  more information: https://gitlab.rlp.net/adwmainz/digicademy/bkd/bkd-presentations/teimec

• A multi-media dictionary of endangered languages with TEI Lex-0: A case study of Hatoma, Yaeyama Ryukyuan  
  In category: encoding challenges, non-western script.
  Uploaded by Natsuko Nakagawa on 26 September 2023.

  Currently, we are building a digital dictionary of Hatoma, a Yaeyama Ryukyuan language, in the TEI Lex-0 format (Romary and Tasovac 2018). The original dictionary was written by Shinichi Kajiku, a native speaker of Hatoma Ryukyuan and a linguist (Kajiku 2020). He spent more than 50 years compiling the dictionary, which was structured in a spreadsheet format by one of the authors in 2019 (Kajiku and Nakagawa 2021). The structured dictionary with audio files for each entry is now available online. We report some elements the dictionary contains and TEI Lex-0 does not assume yet.

• Poster: 3D Text Encoding and TEI: Text, Editions, and Spatiality  
  In category: encoding challenges.
  Uploaded by Jun Ogawa on 23 September 2023.

  This poster presents the 3D text encoding method using TEI schema. Based on the discussion we had in TEI2022, proposing the use ofto represent the three-dimensional spatiality and textual information, we have further developed the method in that more sophisticated encoding such as editorial marks using , , and etc. can be now implemented and automatically rendered to a 3D space by our rendering algorithm. In addition, we will suggest that the 3D text data encoded in that way should function as Linked Data to locate the text in a broader information network of 3D objects and spaces.

• Cracking the Code: Overcoming the Challenges of Encoding Correspondence  
  In category: encoding challenges.
  Uploaded by Dimitra Grigoriou on 21 September 2023.

  W. H. Auden (1907-1973), a prominent figure in the English-language literary landscape of the twentieth century. Despite extensive scholarly exploration of Auden’s English and American periods, his life and artistic contributions in Austria remain comparatively under-explored. It was not until the early 2000s that this aspect of the poet’s life began to garner scholarly attention, as evidenced by the works of Mendelson (2004) and Smith (2004). A new project at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities provides an open-access scholarly digital edition (SDE) that renders accessible the hitherto unattainable “working correspondence” between Auden and Stella Musulin, a writer of Welsh-Austrian origin, dating from 1959-1973 exchanged.
  The decision to employ TEI for encoding the materials was predicated on its provision of conventions that facilitate the description of a text’s physical and semantic structure (Burnard, 2014; Pierazzo, 2015b). Within the TEI language, the tag affords comprehensive guidelines for encoding correspondence by specifying various types of correspondence actions (i.e., sent, received, forwarded, redirected). We aimed at making these communicative activities explicit in formal representations of the information extracted from the materials; nonetheless, in some of the documents making clear distinctions between the categories proved challenging. While our objective was to classify our data within these four categories, we released the need to supplement the existing list of types with a new type, “composed”. Our analysis has revealed that the location and date of letter composition may differ from the location and date of its dispatch, which cannot be accommodated by the current encoding standards. Bibliographic resources (such as Stadler, Illetschko and Seifert 2016,12) acknowledge this peculiarity but fail, at least to our knowledge, to highlight and include this necessary information in the metadata. The solution we propose not only addresses the specific requirements of our project but also satisfies the broader academic imperative of encoding correspondence, particularly in relation to letters from earlier historical periods which may include additional postal specificities such as postal service, stamps, etc.

• Meta-Models Matter --- The tscore R&D Project and "Die Kunst der Fuge"  
  In category: tscore meta-meta-model.
  Uploaded by Markus Lepper on 20 September 2023.

  The poster shows all aggregates required to realize our user-controlled realization of "Die Kunst der Fuge", with comments pointing out their specialities. All are arranged by the three distinct conceptual layers "Model", "Meta-Model", and "Meta-Meta-Model". These assignments are possibly surprising.

• Presentation Slides for " for Non-Western Scripts"  
  In category: non-western script.
  Uploaded by Christian Lück on 20 September 2023.

  Encoding right-to-left script in TEI-XML is a hassle unless one uses an editor that hides away the tags. The problem arises when element names in Latin script interrupt the right-to-left rendering on the editor screen by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. (Davis et al. 2022) However, hiding the tags is not the only solution. With <altIdent> TEI offers a means for declaring alternative names for elements and attributes: names in another language and even in another script. Thus, we can have valid right-to-left-only TEI documents in XML version 1.1, which are readable and editable while tags are visible.

  However, using <altIdent> quickly feels like introducing entropy to the schema. Therefore, the paper suggests not to translate, but to transliterate identifiers. Compared to translation, transliteration is a mechanical process. Implementations exist. Thus, generating a full ODD with element and attribute aliases in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, etc. script becomes simple and fast. It can be pre-built so that the hurdle for encoding non-western script in TEI becomes much lower. The from the paper's title is a tag transliterated to Syriac script: ܬܸ݂.

• Presentation Slides for "TEI XPointer Schemes - Implementation and Example Application"  
  In category: Pointers, Annotation, Overlapping.
  Uploaded by Christian Lück on 20 September 2023.

  The XPointer framework is one of those W3C notions that is dead today. Same with the TEI XPointer schemes. The cause of dead is manifold and ranges from a lack of implementations to weaknesses of the specification: It is unclear, what a processor is to do with the pointers, that actually only point to a portion of a resource. As a consequence, XPointers have never grown to a paradigmatic field of application, in which they could have proven their value. However, there is such a paradigmatic field of application for the TEI XPointer schemes: the Web-Annotations-like element and its @target attribute. If this element is really meant to "represent[] an annotation following the Web Annotation Data Model", like the TEI reference states, then we need a referencing mechanism, that is compatible with the Web Annotation's selector mechanism, and that at a specification level. The TEI XPointer schemes not only do satisfy this requirement, but are the only specified component of the TEI, that satisfies it. The paper first introduces a full implementation. It then showcases an application in an inquiry on intertextuality using the element: The semantic deferrals in the textual tradition of the book of Ijob, originating from the translations of the Masoretic Text to Septuagint and Targum.

• Presentation slides for "Studying Poetry through Music: The Tasso in Music Project"  
  In category: Text and Music.
  Uploaded by Craig Stuart Sapp on 19 September 2023.

  The Tasso in Music Project (https://tassomusic.org) is a complete digital edition of the early modern musical settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95), the most prominent poet of late sixteenth-century Italy. Comprising about 800 musical settings and representing the work of over 200 composers, this repertoire is significant not only for musical reasons—for instance, with many parallel settings of the same poems, the corpus lends itself especially well to comparative analysis—but also, and most importantly in this presentation, for literary reasons, since the musical settings can shed light on the dissemination of Tasso’s work and can offer insight into the form and meaning of his poems.

  Accordingly, besides providing newly made critical editions of the musical settings in a variety of electronic formats (Humdrum, MEI, MusicXML), the project features a substantial literary component whose function is to help us to better understand the tradition of the poetic texts and music/text relations. More specifically, the project includes TEI transcriptions of the poetic texts as they appear in musical settings and in contemporaneous literary sources, both manuscript and printed, as well as tools for the dynamic visualization of literary variants across sources. This textual component provides indispensable data for the study of the transmission of Tasso’s poetry, which is notoriously intricate as many of his poems survive in multiple versions with substantial variants. These data are of interest for musicologists, who can use them to trace the sources used by composers, to assess filiation between settings of the same poem, and to study possible manipulations of literary texts by composers. The data are equally interesting for literary philologists, who can use them to broaden their perspective on the tradition of Tasso’s texts, having access for first time to variants that are recorded only in musical sources, some of which may be ascribable to Tasso himself by virtue of his proximity to several major composers of the time.

  Likewise, building on the possibilities afforded by digital encoding, the Tasso in Music Project offers several online tools to study the interaction of poetry and music, both within single pieces and across the repertoire. The data for both music and poetry are also available for further offline and additional analyses. Currently available online analysis tools address the melismatic treatment of words and the use of textual repetition in the music–the latter is particularly useful to quickly identify keywords in a poem. In the presentation, we will also present new tools that will allow users to analyze the relationship between poetic prosody and musical durations/meter as well as between poetic and musical syntax (for instance, the correspondence, or lack thereof, between ends of poetic lines and cadences), showing how musical settings can function as parsings of a poem’s metric and syntactic structure.

  Through these tools, the Tasso in Music Project restores the centrality of poetry in early modern vocal music, addressing an interdisciplinary audience encompassing not only performers and scholars of music (historians, theorists, music encoders), but also scholars of literature (Italianists, linguists, textual encoders).

• A digital annotated parallel corpus of Athonite text types: Gospel of Matthew  
  In category: tei:event.
  Uploaded by Eka Kvirkvelia on 19 September 2023.

  The paper aims to present the results of the ongoing research project “Digital edition of an annotated parallel corpus of Giorgi Athonite's recension of the Gospel of Matthew” (2021-2023) funded by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation (YS-21-1562). The project is carried out on the technical base of the host institution: Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia).
  The translation of the New Testament and generally biblical texts into Georgian is supposed to have been made since the 4th-5th centuries. The Georgian translation of the four Gospels takes into consideration different traditions. Hence, the manuscripts of the four Gospels that have come down to us preserve non-homogeneous, diverse texts, namely: Pre-Athonite text types (Adishi, Opiza (the same Jrutchi-Parkali) and mixed); Athonite text types (so-called Ekvtimiseuli (belonging to Euthymius) and Giorgi Athonite’s recension) and the Hellenophilic text type.
  Within the project, we are in the process of preparing a parallel digital edition of Athonite text types of Matthew Gospel: a) the final recension of George the Athonite (1009-1065); b) the text reflecting the intermediate stage of George the Athonite’s work; c) and the text of the Gospel preserved in John Chrysostom’s Commentary of the Gospel of Matthew translated by Euthymius the Athonite (955-1028), as well as the English and Greek (Byzantine type) texts. Among the Athonite text types Giorgi the Athonite’s final recension has the most significance, as it is established in the Georgian Church up to these days. Due to this reason, within the current project this text was chosen for annotation. A digital annotated parallel corpus of Athonite text types is based on the theoretical research provided within my doctoral thesis.
  The digital edition of Georgian medieval manuscripts based on the TEI has been an ongoing project at Ilia State University since 2009. Dr. Irina Lobzhanidze has been instrumental in digitizing Georgian medieval manuscripts, particularly the Typicon of the Georgian Monastery of the Holy Cross Near Jerusalem, which was published using eXist-db and TEI Publisher (Lobzhanidze 2021), employing IIIf manifests of the manuscripts.
  The technical team of the current project experimented with exist-DB, but due to limited time and funds from a young researcher grant, they decided to create a flexible platform with a graphical interface for annotating texts. The main goal was to reflect the findings of the doctoral research and publish texts online. The platform (http://ogb.iliauni.edu.ge/) features a user-friendly annotation tool built using standard HTML, CSS, and Javascript, connected to a PostgreSQL database. Researchers can annotate specific manuscript texts, with updates simultaneously reflected in the database and displayed on the OGB webpage alongside parallel annotated texts. Hovering over the texts reveals the annotation records. The platform also allows users to download annotated texts in XML format, with an eye on future collaboration for reusing TEI XMLs of Georgian medieval texts and creating a TEI schema.

  The aim of the project is to create a high-quality digital edition that will serve as a model for the digital publication of other Gospels (of Mark, Luke, and John), as well as other books of the New and Old Testaments based on textological research. Regretfully, however, we do not yet have either a Scholarly edition of the Georgian translations of the four Gospels or an annotated parallel corpus of a digital edition, due to which various text types of Georgian translations of the four Gospels remain inaccessible to foreign scholars. For this reason, the Georgian text is not included in any digital editions of the Greek Gospels and their translations. In such circumstances, an annotated parallel corpus of the Gospel of Matthew has special importance for further research.

• Towards shared TEI model/s for institutional minutes and protocols – protokolleditionen.eu  
  In category: tei:event.
  Uploaded by Stephan Kurz on 19 September 2023.

  A group of scholarly editors working on TEI editions of minutes/protocols is working on common best practices for editing this textual genre. The »Arbeitskreis Digitale Protokolleditionen« group underlines the collaborative and social aspect of TEI editing. Its proposed poster hence does not claim to present results but intends to showcase and encourage a collaborative culture of encoding.

  Following a panel at the DHd2022 conference,[1] a group of scholarly editors working on TEI based editions of minutes (mostly from the political sphere at the moment) from the German speaking countries has met on a regular basis to exchange experiences, markup choices and common ground for exchanging data. In 2023, this loose group rebranded itself as Arbeitskreis Digitale Protokolleditionen.[2]

  To date, the discussions within that group have targeted

  roles and functions of minutes/protocols
  TEI modelling decisions and formalizing of preexisting editing guidelines
  extraction of tei:listEvent data for defining an API for common calendar applications[3]
  strategies for reuse of prosopographical auxiliary/indexing data
  best practices and tools for manual, semi-automatic and automatised edition data enrichment
  sharing and reuse of bibliographical data, e.g. through Zotero

  The poster aims to showcase the opportunities of collaboration across a variety of institutional backgrounds. It serves as an example that the intellectual infrastructure of a common vocabulary (=subset/s of the TEI guidelines) provides chances to discuss, among other issues,

  common ground between DH technologists and domain specialist editors
  possible ways of extracting overlaps in data
  while minimising data input duplication

  These efforts are based on voluntary contribution of the Arbeitskreis members which relies on willingness for formal-informal potlatch style giving and taking, and on the institutional support of the democratic and academic institutions that fund digital editions of minutes. Apart from the concrete example that deals with retro-projecting ideas of open data into the past by unlocking (administrative) written fixations of institutional negotiations and decision making processes, we want to emphasize the inherent social impact of the TEI guidelines: They are a catalyst for discussing important questions of scholarly editing.

  Notes

  [1] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6328072.
  [2] https://www.protokolleditionen.eu/
  [3] This relates to ongoing TEI-C discussions on the model of tei:event, cf. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3447297; https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/2382 and related.