[MEI-L] First sketch from Beethovens Werkstatt

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear Community,

yesterday, our project Beethovens Werkstatt was officially launched with a ceremonial act at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, and I’m glad to inform you about the work that our team has done in the last few weeks. As you know, our work on the project actually started earlier, including contributions to the Music Encoding Conference in Charlottesville. In September, we did a workshop in Detmold with Perry, evaluating possibilities for encoding genetical processes in Beethoven’s manuscripts. During this workshop, we came up with a model which heavily relies on the facsimiles, instead of trying to reflect graphical details into the MEI code. 

The model is still not complete, but we anticipate to propose it as addition to MEI. You can have a look at its current state at https://github.com/BeethovensWerkstatt/Data-Model. We will provide additional documentation (read: a chapter for the Guidelines plus several examples) and move it to the MEIncubator for review. The main motivation for setting up our own repo is that the proposed module should be absolutely generic, whereas our implementation for Beethoven will be specific, and it seems good to separate these things right away. 

In order to illustrate the use of this model, and to show the potential of combining high-res facsimiles with MEI and SVG, we’ve set up a prototype that explains the textual development of a small section of Beethoven’s op.111. This prototype is available at 

http://beethovens-werkstatt.de/demo/index.html. 

Again, this is work in progress with a whole lot of known limitations. In the near future, we plan to provide a full english localization at least of the tool (the contents may take more time). Also, we plan to consider the key signature when providing note labels in the interface ;-) 
Our schedule is to clean the code so that others may step in or fork our code more easily, and we hope to put everything on Github in January. In the meantime, we’re happy about feedback, either here on MEI-L or by personal message to me or someone else from the team. Please keep in mind, though, that this prototype is not the final result of our work, but the first trial.

For the Beethoven team,
Johannes