NFDI4Culture Metadata API

The jury of the 3rd NFDI4Culture Music Award has met and published a shortlist

The jury of the 3rd NFDI4Culture Music Award, consisting of representatives from NFDI4Culture, the Society for Music Research (GfM) and the Centre for Music – Edition – Media (ZenMEM), met last week and had a lively discussion about the submissions received by 9 November 2024. A positive aspect to be emphasised is the careful examination of all project submissions with regard to the consortium's goals of stimulating the handling of digital research data in musicology.

The jury would particularly like to emphasise the following three projects on the NFDI4Culture Music Award shortlist:

Anke Hofmann, Romy Gildemeister, Ingrid Jach and Elisa Klar (Library and Archive HMT Leipzig)

Cultural data and cultural transfer ­– the CARLA project as a digital research environment for the history of the Leipzig Conservatory 1843–1918

CARLA (Conservatory Archive Records Leipzig with Additions) is a database of the HMT Leipzig Library and Archive, which has been indexing people at the Leipzig Conservatory since its foundation in 1843 until 1918 with corresponding source and metadata since September 2024. This makes biographical data of the international student body, their teachers and the subjects they taught accessible. The mapped network of approximately 13,000 people includes the possibility of assigning teachers to their students, the representation of jointly attended ‘classes’ as well as temporal, geographical and gender-specific groupings. The submitted project pursues developments on two levels, namely on the one hand the optimisation of the data sets with a view to persistence and RDF data modelling and on the other hand – and this is where the innovative potential lies – the organisation of an event as a ‘Hands-on-Lab “Transcription of student records in the Wikiverse”’ to involve the interested public in the generation of new data sets for successful crowd sourcing and the expansion of the participatory approach in research.

Dennis Ried (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

Baumann Digital

On the occasion of the ‘rediscovery’ of (Carl) Ludwig Baumann's manuscripts, a generic MEI-based catalogue raisonné of Baumann's works was created in the course of or as a follow-up to several qualification theses involved. This was followed by intensive research into Baumann's oeuvre and its digital cataloguing as part of the applicant's dissertation. In structural terms, the project is a typical example of digital research in the humanities, which is often pursued for specific interests but is not always embedded in large-scale projects or superordinate infrastructures in such a way as to enable sustainable operation and low-threshold reuse. Nevertheless, the developed tool has already been used a second time, namely for the Joachim Raff Archive (Lachen/SZ, Switzerland), thus demonstrating that the customisation of such a tool is possible and feasible.
While the source code is already freely available, it is difficult to adapt and reuse it for other issues because – as is common in many projects due to a lack of resources – systematic documentation is not usually eligible for funding in the narrower sense. The project would like to develop such documentation using this example as an example by specifically commissioning someone other than the person who created the code to do so in order to deal with ambiguities in the process at the same time.

Tim Eipert and Lucas Hofmann (University of Würzburg)

Workshop ‘Sustainable data infrastructures in musicological corpus research: Formats, standards and goals’

The proposed workshop project aims at focussing on the accessibility of the fortunately increasing number of music-related data repositories for corpus studies. In order to keep such large data sets available without restriction and for a wide range of research questions in the future, GitHub is currently often used as a platform that is ultimately dependent on Microsoft. With a view to corpus studies, future independent infrastructures must strive for more cooperation within music research, joint interdisciplinary projects and uniform formats and standards within the community. As part of the workshop, a concept paper for sustainability in musicological corpus research will be developed and published in the NFDI4Culture Knowledge Base, among other places.

The winner will be announced on Friday, 6 December.