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

Digital Man and the desire for physical objects

Extract: In 1999 I attended a conference about digitizing manuscript corpora at which the participants were convinced of the imminent demise of print culture: all access to document images would be online, all ‘facsimiles’ would be on CD-ROM. That didn’t happen. On the contrary: the British Library found that putting manuscript images online stimulated the sales of paper facsimiles of those books. Despite Amazon’s success with Kindle (sales of eBooks finally outstripped sales of hardbacks in 2012), there is still no substitute for a paper copy for performing; for handling a physical object to understand the relationship of pages (and pieces) to one another; for getting simple pleasure from ownership of something beautiful. The demand for facsimiles, particularly of objects that simply cannot be handled in the everyday way for which they were intended, is still high, and will probably never be lost. This is far from the whole story however: Google Books was launched in 2004, and despite the almost continuous lawsuits that have accompanied its progress, by March 2012 it had digitized more than 20 million books. Online delivery and access is unstoppable, and the demand for more online materials escalates with it

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music: The evolution of a digital resource

This article discusses the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), and the ground-breaking work they have done in digitizing manuscript sources for medieval music. In many cases this has involved digital reconstruction where the notation is illegible, erased, or hidden under later texts. Through their good example DIAMM have been instrumental in educating photographers in archives and researchers alike in the proper methodology of digital photography with regard to medieval manuscripts. Their standards are especially high in capturing the images and the metadata they store. This enables them to undertake the sometimes miraculous digital restoration. The article covers the methodology of the DIAMM project, the delivery of images, and some of the problems they have encountered