Explorations in Linked Data practice for early music corpora

Abstract

Exploring connections between pieces, people and places and relating them to culture as a whole is a central activity of musicology. As libraries increase the availability of musical information in digital form, the data available for such research also expands, but to take such resources together and combine them with others that are relevant a further step of alignment and linkage is needed. We describe here the process and tools we applied to two corpora of early modern music: Early Music Online, which comprises catalogue metadata in MarcXML and facsimile images for approximately 8,500 items of early printed music; and the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music, containing over 1,000 pieces with supporting metadata. A supervised process with automated elements assists the musicologist to create a linked and extensible knowledge structure, aligning entities within and between corpora and to external Linked Data. Finally, we reflect upon how we believe these methods integrate with, and indeed form a crucial element of, the transformed process of modern digital scholarship.