medieval song on the web

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Medieval Song on the Web Image, Text, Media, and Annotation

Robert Sanderson rsanderson@lanl.gov Los Alamos National Laboratory Benjamin Albritton blalbrit@stanford.edu Stanford University

http://lib.stanford.edu/dmm http://www.shared-canvas.org/

This presentation arises from work that is funded, in part, by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Overview

•  Medieval Song in the Digital Environment •  Annotation of web-based resources •  Motivation and light framework overview •  Use-cases and demos •  Possible next-steps for song projects wanting to use

digital tools and resources

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Describing Song

•  How to adequately discuss a complex, compound entity? •  Text or texts •  Music (often multiple simultaneous voices) •  Performance •  Manuscript witnesses

•  Mise-en-page and other issues of layout •  Variants •  Decorations

•  The interactions and relationships between these elements

•  Beyond the individual scholar

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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From Analog to Digital

Transcribed Example

Analytical Reduction

Explanatory Annotation

Describing Example

Narrative Argument

Jennifer Bain, “Theorizing the Cadence in the Music of Machaut,” Journal of Music Theory 47/2 (2003), 334-35

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Using and Presenting Digital Facsimiles

Some Requirements: •  Gather information from various sources •  Multiple layers of commentary •  Ability to provide context for examples •  Include all of the data that supports the argument •  Allow feedback •  Include many types of media •  Possibility of non-linearity •  Permanence •  And… ?

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Motivating Questions

Many implicit assumptions:

•  What is a Manuscript? •  What is its relation to a facsimile? •  What is the relation of a transcription

of a facsimile to the original object?

What does this mean for digital tools?

•  How do we rethink digital facsimiles in a shared, distributed, global space?

•  How do we enable collaboration and encourage engagement?

Ms MurF: 10.5076/e-codices-kba-0003

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Vision

A collaborative future: •  Rich landscape of interconnected

repositories of images, texts, media •  Seamless user interfaces disconnected

from the repositories •  Improve efficiency and usability through

open, shared development •  Requirements:

•  Shared data model •  Shared services for facsimiles and

scholarly data

BNF f.fr 113, folio 1 recto

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Naïve Approach: Transcribe Images Directly

But how to align multiple images, pages without images, fragments… ?!

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations

CCC 26 f. iiiR

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations

CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations

CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Naïve Approach: Multiple Representations

CCC 26 f. iiiR Fold A Open Fold A and B Open f. iiiV

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Canvas Paradigm

•  A Canvas is an empty space in which to build up a display •  A SharedCanvas's top left and bottom right corners correspond to the equivalent corners of a folio

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Technology: Open Annotation

•  http://www.openannotation.org/

•  Focus on interoperable sharing of annotations •  Web-centric and open, not locked down silos •  Create, consume and interact in different environments

•  “Annotation”

•  Scholarly commentary about the manuscript •  Painting resources on the SharedCanvas

•  Hardest part: Define what an Annotation is! •  "Aboutness" is key to distinguish from general metadata

A document that describes how one resource is about

one or more other resources, or part thereof.

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Open Annotation Model

•  Annotation (a document) •  Body (the ‘comment’ of the annotation) •  Target (the resource the Body is ‘about’)

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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OAC Annotations to Paint Images

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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OAC Annotations to Paint Text

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Transcription: Morgan 804

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Transcription: Morgan 804

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Demo 1: Layering Image and Text

•  http://shared-canvas.org/impl/demo1

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Musical Manuscripts: Parker CCC 008

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Demo 2: Beyond Text (Music and Media)

•  http://shared-canvas.org/impl/demo2

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Demo 3: Transcribing in the Digital Environment

•  Work with interoperable repositories •  Use tools designed for the task:

•  Transcription •  Annotation

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Summary

Model: Canvas paradigm provides a coherent solution to modeling the layout of medieval manuscripts

•  Annotations, and Collaboration, at the heart of the model

Implementation: •  Distribution across repositories for images, text, commentary •  Consistent methods to access content from many repositories •  Encourages tool development by experts in the field

The SharedCanvas model implemented by distributed repositories brings the humanist's primary research objects to their desktop in a powerful, extensible and interoperable fashion

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Conclusion: Next Steps

Project-centric Approach: •  Identify research goals •  Encourage interoperability •  Use existing tools or develop new modules in the interoperable

environment •  What is specific to song study? •  What is general?

•  Build teams that include digital repositories, software developers, and scholars

Medieval Song on the Web Senate House, 12th of September 2011, London, England

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Thank You

Robert Sanderson rsanderson@lanl.gov azaroth42@gmail.com @azaroth42 Benjamin Albritton blalbrit@stanford.edu @bla222 Web: http://lib.stanford.edu/dmm http://www.shared-canvas.org/ Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2925 Slides: http://slidesha.re/oJnmGe Acknowledgements

DMSTech Group: http://dmstech.group.stanford.edu/ Open Annotation Collaboration: http://www.openannotation.org/