Abstract
In this article we provide a case study in the datafication of historical handwritten manuscripts, which diversifies the repertoire, approaches, demographics, and institutional partnerships of MIR. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) is a community-based project to digitize music and text, teach, and make music from facsimiles of manuscripts held by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. The corpus comprises 850 high-resolution photographs of handwritten music manuscripts and catalog pages, with a total of around 1,300 melodies. Much of the music was collected by pioneering Belarusian ethnographer Zusman Kiselgof among Jewish communities in the 'Pale of Settlement' (mostly in modern Ukraine and Belarus) during the An-Ski Expeditions of 1912-1914. The repertoire is mixed, combining typical Jewish dance and non-dance genres, European society and folklore dance music, and a relatively small quantity of songs and liturgical chant settings. The project simultaneously encodes music in formats accessible to computational musicology and enhances a creative musical community and deeply valued heritage. We introduce the project in dialogue with a recent article by Georgina Born on diversity in the field of MIR; present the material, issues for datafication, and results thus far; describe project elements that enhance musical community; demonstrate the diversity of participants with respect to age, gender, nationality, and profession; outline implications for MIR and computational ethnomusicology; and suggest new funding models and partnerships in support of cultural heritage documentation, preservation, continuity, and analysis.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 208-221 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
13 As of October 2022, a collaborative team has begun the work of developing editorial policies for both music and text through the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions Planning Grant. Structural choices made for the project were influenced by the anticipated needs of a larger digital humanities project—The Klezmer Archive. The Klezmer Archive Project is currently in a research and development stage, aiming to create a ‘universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music’ (Klezmer Institute, 2019). It will bridge the gap between oral history and archives by being a space where culture bearers and community members can engage with archival items and one another by drawing connections between tunes, discussing genre classifications, searching for unnamed melodies, and comparing recorded versions of the same tune. The KMDMP is a testing ground for methods and tools to be used in the broader Klezmer Archive. The Klezmer Archive Project is funded by a Phase I Digital Humanities Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2021–2022. As a case study for the Klezmer Archive, small parts of KMDMP work have been supported by the NEH grant. KMDMP does not have independent funding and is supported solely by individual donations.
Keywords
- Jewish music
- computational ethnomusicology
- crowdsourcing
- heritage music
- klezmer
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Music
- Library and Information Sciences
- Museology
- Linguistics and Language