Schubert digital

Schubert digital (in progress) is a research platform presenting the projects of the Vienna research group of the New Schubert Edition at the ACDH-CH. Currently, a database of autographes of Franz Schubert’s musical sources is developed in which the sources are described on multiple levels. Of interest here are all aspects that constitute the source in its present form, including information regarding paper, writing material and provenance. Since some manuscripts were divided into single pages and are now in different locations, the project aims to virtually reconstruct the original form of the autograph. Of course, on a third level, the musical work itself is also described in its exact stage (sketch, version, fragment, etc.). It is not unusual for Schubert to reuse blank pages or even lines of a manuscript for other works, therefore several works can be found in one source.

The project is documented according to the guidelines of the XML-based coding process of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) which is regarded as state of the art in digital musicology. The data input of the source descriptions and linking to registers for persons, institutions and works is carried out in a MerMEId application (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data) specially adjusted to the project needs. Due to our aim to make information as much machine readable as possible, Schubert’s autographs can be searched in various ways. Digital copies of the sources are made available within the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and reference is made to the digital collections of the holding libraries.