Conference Conference Paper Presentation | 16. September 2024

Wi(e)der die Datenmodellierung – NFDI4Culture at Gesellschaft für Musikforschung

By Dr. Martha Stellmacher and Dr. Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier

The colleagues from the field of musicology within NFDI4Culture have once again contributed to the programme of this year's annual conference for music research with a panel proposal. 
In line with the subtitle of this annual conference – "wider den Methodenzwang" – this group from NFDI4Culture, together with two colleagues from music philology research projects, focused on a seemingly divisive term and its meaning: data modelling.

This term sometimes has an almost deterrent effect on colleagues who have little contact with the digital humanities and occasionally even triggers ‘resistance’ – the against (german ‘wider') in the title picks up on this effect; ‘again’ ('wieder'), on the other hand, stands for the repeated attempt to show how helpful, how necessary ‘data modelling’ is.

In short, ‘data modelling’ means that data and its structure must be adapted to the respective object of research, ‘tailored to the body’, and thus, against the thematic background of historical performance practice, the aim of this round table and its four short inputs was to overcome the reluctance to use data modelling and to demonstrate the immensely productive benefits of data modelling.

In four inputs or use cases, the possibilities and challenges of data modelling and experiences from specific music and theatre studies project contexts were presented.
Theatre scholar Melanie Gruß (University of Leipzig) used examples from the project ‘Cultural Heritage Dance in the GDR’ to highlight the challenges that performance events pose for data modelling. An event-based approach is necessary for their description, which on the one hand elevates the staging or choreography to the status of a work (in the sense of the FRBR model) and, in addition to place and time, enables further entities (persons, works, etc.) as well as the connection of surviving objects in various media formats (e. g. reviews, illustrations, photographs, etc.). In this regard, she pointed out the current deficits in the Common Authority File, which are to be remedied by the work of the Performing Arts Working Group.

Music and information scientist Kristina Richts-Matthaei (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatut Mainz) took up the issue of digital modelling of performances. She briefly outlined how data modelling should be structured with regard to (not only) historical performances and showed the advantages of good data modelling (transparency, networkability, backbone and increased visibility of research). 

Vera Grund's (DHI Rome) contribution focused on experiences from the project ‘Dance/Music Digital: Encoding the stage’, in which time/space progressions are examined, text and image sources are brought together, how the stage space can be coded and integrated into digital editions – a project in which the historical conditions and contexts of the performance are particularly at the centre.

Silke Reich (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) used the film music to ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ as an example to show how compositions involving many actors (composers, arrangers, directors, ...) can be modelled. In contrast to the previous examples, this is music that is intended for a one-off realisation (namely in a film).

The contributions were the starting point for a lively discussion with the more than 50 visitors to the panel. The questions discussed included how interoperable FRBR models are or can be for different research questions and objects, or to what extent their authors should also be made visible in (book and digital) editions in order to make it clear that a modelling or edition is always an interpretation.

Programme:

• Melanie Gruß: Data modelling of performance events in theatre and dance studies
• Kristina Richts-Matthaei: Requirements for cataloguing concepts of performances
• Vera Grund: The project ‘Dance/Music Digital: Encoding the stage’Silke Reich: Modelling requirements for film music using the example of Erich Wolfgang Korngold
• Moderation: Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier and Martha Stellmacher