Narratives and exploration in a musicology app: Supporting scholarly argument with the Lohengrin TimeMachine

Abstract

We present the Lohengrin TimeMachine web application, consisting of video and textual musicological essays supported by an interactive digital companion. The digital companion allows a user to browse and compare all the occurrences of a motive in the opera Lohengrin, viewing them by text, vocal score and orchestration, with detailed views, segment labelling, audio excerpts and textual commentaries supporting the exploration. The video and essay modes show live links into the companion as the viewer or reader progresses through the narrative. This application is built on Linked Data technology and demonstrates the viability of such an approach, with the knowledge graph being traversed in the user’s browser to gather the materials for display. It uses the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework, which provides the basis for a range of music-related Linked Data applications. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the application in use, its technological underpinnings, as well as the motivation and implementation experience.