Musicians and their environment
Persona
Sophia is a musicologist and a practising musician.
Goal
Sophia is interested in understanding the social-historical reasons behind how the music was created and how it sounds.
Scenario
Sophia is doing social-historical research, using textual sources. One of her current projects is concerned with the relationship between music, medicine and religion at a particular charitable institution in 17th century Italy. The sources she uses, which are also not digitized, include records of an institution, payslips etc.
Competency questions
CQ1. What was the composer’s network (patrons, institutions …)?
- What is the “intellectual framework” of a musician? which explains why certain music was played and how it was played
- What is the time relationship between different musicians, e.g. who was working at the same time?
- What relationships exist between institutions, e.g. employment of the same musicians; and between people and institutions, e.g. between a number of composers and a printer?
CQ2. What relationships exist between different sources of information, e.g. payslips and accounts?
Resources
The resources which Sophia uses are often not digitized. Therefore she needs to visit libraries. Whilst there, she will sift through the appropriate material, and take photographs of the most relevant. She will then analyze these photographs on her return home. In one particular library she may not be able to take photographs, and there she can only take notes. Sophia uses spreadsheets to maintain and compare information.
Sophia’s work could be helped by:
- digitalisation of her source material;
- handwriting OCR;
- data visualization, e.g. to illustrate relationships between composers, institutions etc.;
- use of a database, i.e. as upgrade to current use of spreadsheets;
- named-entity recognition