Project description

Synopsis

The CFEO project - which ran from March 2004 to August 2007 - had four key aims:

  • To create an online resource uniting the original impressions of Chopin's first editions in an unprecedented virtual collection
  • To provide comparative text-analytical commentary on the multiple first editions in this archive
  • To develop complex textual interlinking of this virtual collection and relevant excerpts of the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (co-authored by Christophe Grabowski and John Rink, forthcoming 2009)
  • To devise innovative technical methodologies for complex web delivery of this material, using advanced imaging techniques allied with relevant open standards for metadata and interface design.

An archive comprising c. 5,500 digital images of Chopin's first editions has been made available online without password restriction, prerequisite subscription or payment. It has been drawn from the holdings of five lead institutions - Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina and the University of Chicago Library, which together provided c. 4,550 (83%) of the required images - as well as those of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (c. 270 images; 5%), New York Public Library (c. 150 images; 3%) and fifteen other institutions (c. 530 images; 9%). The full score of each original impression appears along with excerpts from the Annotated Catalogue and commentary on salient textual characteristics.

Significance

  • An important body of primary source material is comprehensively assembled for the first time, facilitating philological and style-historical investigation and encouraging new understanding of Chopin's compositional and publication histories.
  • The Online Collection – totalling some 270 scores – provides direct access to musicians and musicologists to the Chopin first editions.
  • The text-analytical commentary and online catalogue excerpts foreground the major differences between multiple first editions and their chronological and filial relationships.
  • The search facilities enable classification by genre, key, publisher, place of publication, dedicatee etc.
  • The technical outcomes are generalisable to similar projects of a musical and/or non-musical nature and to other initiatives.

Methodology

The project consisted of four principal activities:

  • Acquisition of digital images of Chopin's first editions
  • Comparative textual analysis of multiple first editions
  • Adaptation and expansion of information derived from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions
  • Development and refinement of the technical means to display these images and related text.

These activities were conducted by the Project Director and three Research Fellows at Royal Holloway, University of London, and by the technical team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).

Timescale

In Year 1, the technical team at CCH established standards and methods using nominated library collections for benchmark definition. The team carried out technical consultations in Chicago, while Dr Grabowski visited various collections to examine materials prior to digitisation. Scanning commenced at several libraries. Dr Grabowski began the analysis while Dr Stefanou proceeded with library orders, mark-up and XML text conversion. Years 2 and 3 involved further scanning, mark-up, text preparation/conversion and analysis of the editions, as well as the development of an extensive database. The final six months of the project were spent finalising the metadata, refining and testing the interface design, and disseminating the results of the project.

Technical methods

The project team at CCH set and monitored scanning standards, created metadata schemata, and developed tools for online display, manipulation and searching. The team also devised an image-display system allowing musicians and musicologists to search and browse images of different sizes, to move easily between and compare multiple editions of a piece, and to retrieve analytical materials in appropriate contexts.