Finding What You Need, and Knowing What You Can Find: Digital Tools for Palaeographers in Musicology and Beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making fluid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed

Learning from Madoff: Lessons for Foundation Boards

More than 80 percent of foundations that lost between 30 to 100 percent of their assets to Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme had fewer than five trustees serving on their boards. In Learning from Madoff, NCRP research and policy director Niki Jagpal and research assistant Julia Craig examined whether there was any link between board size and diversity, and exposure to Madoff's fraudulent activities

Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina

Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina by Lisa Ranghelli and Julia Craig looks at 2003-2007 data from 13 North Carolina nonprofits, which shows high return on investments and non-monetary gains on a range of issues including poverty, worker rights, education, health care, housing, environment and civil rights

Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles

Analyzes the policy impacts and monetary benefits fifteen Los Angeles County community organizations achieved for marginalized groups with foundation support in 2004-08. Presents effective strategies used and recommends greater roles for local funders

RE-EXAMINING SCHOLARSHIP: EXPLORING THE MEANINGS OF BOYER'S DIMENSIONS TO THE PROFESSORIATE

Since Boyer's (1990) seminal publication on scholarship there has been a steadily expanding body of knowledge concerned with reviewing the priorities of the professoriate in higher education (HE). This dissertation enters that discourse by exploring HE educators' perceptions of Boyer's (1990) multiple dimensions of scholarship. It also accepts the challenge offered by Schon (1996) that examination of the new dimensions of scholarship requires a new epistemology by designing and employing a spiral methodology. This twofold task forms the basis of this dissertation. This investigation is contextually located in an education department in a large university in the United States of America. It delves into the opinions of educators as they relate to scholarly practices, and the influence of the institutional ideology embedded in the structure of HE in today's modem universities. The study then focuses on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and renders problematic the proposed assessment standard of reflective practice. The use of my spiral methodology in action opens up both the framework and the theoretical structure for critical examination. It reveals, through the praxis how the phased structure has allowed the research project to extend into using such diverse research methods as an email survey, interviews through conversations and autoethnography. This study offers contributions in two distinct areas. Firstly, the investigation into educators' perceptions of scholarship revealed four important issues: • a strong desire to see the definitions expanded • that the SoTL is a contested and poorly understood dimension • the rhetoric of reflective practice is often very different to the practice • the ideology and epistemology of the institution dictate the priorities Secondly, the spiral methodology which holds reflexivity as a central tenet proved capable of offering a sensitive, flexible, interconnected framework within which to conduct research in the complex and context bound environment of research in educational settings. There are a number of potential future directions that could be developed from my research some of which include: • investigating institutional commitment to implementing campus changes • the impact of proposed changes on the student population • examining the contested meaning of reflective practice in theory and practice • further development of a reflexive spiral methodology • expansion of the combination of critical analysis and boundary conversations This dissertation should be read both as a very personal sequential journey into researching, and as a growing understanding of the research topics. This evolution has led to altering some of my early methodological claims and demonstrates my commitment to an open and honest account

Strip and tease: digitally undressing Tudor scribes

High-resolution digital images of our collections are reshaping our understanding of how we can approach and use damaged manuscripts. The most damaged sources can usually not be held or examined closely, but a very high quality digital image can serve as a literal surrogate, allowing us to access and even repair a damaged manuscript in a way that would otherwise be impossible. This way of interacting with manuscripts has radically changed the landscape of document research as well as the activities and functions of archives, libraries and scholars, and it has opened the door to some exciting advances in research. This paper discusses two very different approaches to manuscripts with extreme problems of legibility and access, examining the results and processes needed to tease out enough information by stripping back damage to achieve a usable result

From perfect to preposterous: how digital restoration can both help and hinder our reading of damaged sources

Digital reproductions of manuscripts are now reasonably easy to obtain from a very wide variety of libraries, although persuading suppliers to meet the standards required for digital restoration - or even high-quality reproduction - is surprisingly difficult. As more researchers tackle image-processing to help them read damaged originals, the need for suppliers to meet a baseline standard is much greater. The paper examines a set of basic guidelines for requesting images for research purposes A demonstration of some 'virtual restoration' techniques on a variety of different types of damage as well as photographic techniques such as ultra-violet, infra-red and multi-spectral imaging as adjuncts to normal color imaging will also be discussed