Text and Video Documentation for the Domestic Beethoven Annotator App

Overview

The Beethoven in the House project began in 2020 and ran for three years, ending in 2023. Itspurpose was to aid musicologists in the use of digitized resources for research, allowing usersto access and display digital holdings in distant archives, select and comment on musicalobjects in the materials, and share their targeted comments with other researchers. The projectresulted in the development of a prototype for an online app that uses Linked Data to providesupport for storing, sharing, and publishing musical commentary along with the exact fragmentsof the digital music resources they reference. This tool is a proof of concept for writing editorialannotations as Linked Open Data, and was funded in part by the DeutscheForschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Projektnummer 429039809.While we have produced documentation for our data model, and also for our encodingmethodology, user documentation for the online digital application, for which both the model andthe procedures were developed, is still lacking. This is a significant shortcoming, as a lack ofuser documentation greatly limits the life of an application beyond the original project, and it canseverely hinder efforts by other researchers to build upon the work accomplished by theproject's development team. Documentation is also essential when a project endeavors toadhere to FAIR principles for data management. Without documentation, a project cannot trulyclaim its data meets the standard for Reusability, nor can it achieve an even reasonable degreeof Accessibility–remaining opaque and out of reach for most anyone who would use it.The Beethoven in the House project was predicated on the Open Research model promulgatedby the European Commission, and as Beethoven in the House was funded by a grant from theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, it should naturally adhere to Open Research principles asmuch as possible. As of this date, the project's Annotator App has no documentation, and thereare no plans to produce documentation now that the project has ended.This project will remedy this deficiency and provide the clear and comprehensive documentationrequired for the completed digital research output to qualify as Open Source, and in addition,will contribute greatly to the software's sustainability.Included in this proposal are visual media such as screencasts and videos, innovative means ofdelivery for software documentation, and methods that remain seldom used for experimentalsoftware. Not all scholars have the patience to wade through user documentation beforeattempting to use an app. The use of videos with clearly marked signposts, can greatly speedthe learning process, increasing accessibility of the app and making it more appealing tomusicologists. Supplementing text documentation with video materials also helps in overcominglanguage barriers, an important consideration in a research context that benefits frominternational collaboration. The videos will cover not only the application and its features, butalso a demonstration of how it was combined with other tools in the Beethoven in the Houseworkflow.

Key Facts

Project type:
Transfer
Project duration:
03/2024 - 05/2024
Contribution to sustainability:
Quality Education

More Information

Principal Investigators

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Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Berndt

Musicology Seminar Detmold/Paderborn

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Project Team

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Dr. Mark Saccomano

Bereich Prof. Dr. Andreas Münzmay

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