Presented at Indiana University, Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, 2012.

1. Facsimiles of Text and Music
From Distributed Resources
Benjamin Albritton
blalbrit@stanford.edu
Scholarly Editions and the Digital Age: Text and Music
31 August 2012, Bloomington, IN

2. Overview
• Brief context of current medieval manuscript
interoperability work
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Stanford and partners
• What do we mean by “interoperability”?

3. The Problem
• Medieval projects as “curated and
comprehensive” efforts
• Technical and social silos
• Expensive to maintain
• Difficult to extend

4. The Goal
• Toward a “commons” of distributed resources
• Aggregating information and extensibility as
an alternate to “curated and comprehensive”
• Allow people to do cool new stuff with our
stuff (without losing our relevance)

5. Text Repositories
• Long history
• Deep inventory
• Domain-specific (often)
• Some images
• Static Interface
• …

6. Image Repositories
• A “standard model”
• Lots of images
• Descriptive metadata
• Silo interfaces
• Built-in tools
• No way to access
outside “stuff” for
comparison
• Mediates use
• Expensive to maintain

7. Repository to Repository
Parker: CCCC 410 – De speculatione musice
• One-off sharing
• Human-brokered
• But:
• Expense
• Not scalable
• What if:
• CHMTL wants
images for all MSS
of its texts?
• Parker wants texts
for all its music
theory?
• BNF wants… ? CHMTL: 1970, Corpus scriptorum text
of De speculatione musice

8. But what about…
• Other resources
“about” an object
or text
• … stored and
served in other
places
• … that you might
not know about
• How to build
extensible
facsimiles?

9. “Interoperability”
• Step 1: Expose resources to
shared tools
• Step 2: Enhance resources
• Match text to image
• Match image to text
• Exposure is low cost
• Shared tools let other people
make your stuff better
• Specialists build the domain-
specific tools

10. Step 3: Enhance existing data

11. Step 4: CHMTL text + Parker image

12. Digital Facsimiles from
Distributed Resources
• Parker image served from Stanford
• Text provided by CHMTL
• Linkage produced in T-PEN
• Data for text re-stored at Los Alamos National
Lab
• Re-presented in a new environment that also
allows presentation of even more annotations
and links

13. Aggregating distributed resources

14. Transcribing from Digital Surrogates
La Terre de Secille

15. Naïve Approach: Attach Transcription to Image
One problem example: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR

16. Naïve Approach: Attach Transcription to Image
One problem example: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open

17. Naïve Approach: Attach Transcription to Image
One problem example: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open

18. Naïve Approach: Attach Transcription to Image
One problem example: Multiple Representations
CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open f. iiiV

19. The Shared Canvas
• Represents a real world thing we
want to “talk” about
• Has a unique name
• http://dms-data.stanford.edu/Parker/CCC026/canvas-12

20. Facsimiles are “about” a real thing

21. Parker Image re-served in
SharedCanvas viewer

22. Re-presented with text in side-by-side
view…

23. … or overlaid

24. The Distributed Facsimile

25. Examples of other resources attached
to the facsimile:
• Detail images overlaid

26. Examples of other resources attached
to the facsimile:
• User-generated
comments (public
and private)
• Audio
performances of
notated music
• Overlaid text
transcription
• Also:
• Data sets
• Mark-up
• Base image
choices

27. Conclusion
• Distributed resources exist independently of the
aggregation – could be re-presented in any UI
• In short:
– Expose repository and project data via API and
common data models
– Leads to:
• Greater use of repository resources
• Sustainability
• Enhanced repository data
• Cool new uses of the data we’ve already produced

28. Thank You
• More Info:
– Benjamin Albritton, Stanford University Libraries
• blalbrit@stanford.edu
– CHMTL & Dr. Giuliano Di Bacco, Indiana University
• http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/
– SharedCanvas
• Author and architect: Robert Sanderson, Los Alamos National Lab
– azaroth42@gmail.com
• Description and implementations:
– www.shared-canvas.org
– T-PEN
• PI: James Ginther (coming up next), Saint Louis University
• Try it!
– http://t-pen.org/TPEN
– Slides (within a week)
• http://www.stanford.edu/group/dmstech/