[MEI-L] mono:di 1.0

[TW]

Dear MEI community,


TL;DR summary:

We invite you to launch Chrome or Firefox and try mono:di 1.0:

  https://monodi.corpus-monodicum.de/

Consult the Workflow section on the help page for a quick
introduction.  Most important to know:  Music entry is highly keyboard
centric and text has to be input before music.


Long version:

Thanks for taking the time ;-).  I'd like to give a report on the
state of mono:di[1], the transcription software of the Corpus
monodicum project[2].  After some delays last year before we
eventually were able to enter the test phase, it's successfully been
in production use since the beginning of this year and has been used
to input several thousand lines of transcriptions of neumatic
notation.

Corpus monodicum is an editorial project sponsored by the Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz[3], housed at the Institut für
Musikforschung, Universität Würzburg[4]. Corpus monodicum produces
scholarly editions of the Latin-texted, medieval monophonic
repertories—both sacred and secular—that form the historical
foundation of European music, but have thus far been under-represented
in musicological scholarship.

Notengrafik Berlin[5] was commissioned to create an input tool that would

- make inputting the special type of notation which was chosen for
transcriptions much more efficient than with common notation software,
- yield MEI data that could be used for typesetting the printed edition and
- be suitable for building a digital edition.

>From the start, we planned a multi-stage development process.  In the
first development phase we concentrated on implementing essential
functionality allowing editors to input data efficiently that could be
used for creating the first printed volumes.

We're very pleased that editors indeed praise the efficiency of entry.
 Currently, the typesetting process is being prepared.  We will use
Score as a workbench for our purpose-built spacing and layout
algorithms that are the result of an intensive and ambitious
discussion on typographic detail between Corpus monodicum and
Notengrafik Berlin.

After typesetting the first volumes, we hope to enter the next
development phase where we want to improve usability based on
experience with mono:di 1.0, add some functionality, prepare for
requirements of upcoming volumes covering other genres and improve the
encoding scheme to make it more semantically accurate and less
pragmatically rough-and-ready.  We also want to improve code quality
and, of course, eliminate remaining bugs and teething troubles.

Although mono:di is tailored to the needs of Corpus monodicum, we
invite everybody to try it[1].  To keep development effort spent on
cross-browser issues low, mono:di only supports Chrome and Firefox
browsers.  Please consult the Workflow section of mono:di's help page
for an introduction on how to use it.  (An important point to notice
is: In contrast to conventional notation software, text is input first
and music is attached to the text, not the other way round.)

We will not give user accounts to people outside the project, but
thanks to modern web technology, mono:di can be used as an offline web
app, storing your music in the browser's local storage.  This was
implemented for enabling editors to work with mono:di even when they
do not have internet access, e.g. when working "in the field" where
network connection might be unreliable or not available to them.

We will be releasing the source code of mono:di under BSD conditions
in a few weeks.  Distribution of the transcriptions will initially be
exclusive to the publisher of the printed volumes.  Probably 2-3 years
after each print publication, the MEI data of the respective volume
will be released to the public in form of a digital edition.  I'm
intending to provide sample data soon, though.

Please feel free to ask any questions about the project and the
software, but I'll only be able to answer them in about 10 days.

With the best wishes for Easter
Thomas



[1] https://monodi.corpus-monodicum.de/
[2] http://www.adwmainz.de/projekte/corpus-monodicum-die-einstimmige-musik-des-lateinischen-mittelalters-gattungen-werkbestaende-kontexte/
[3] http://www.adwmainz.de/
[4] http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-wuerzburg.de/
[5] http://notengrafik.com/