LARGE BOWED STRING INSTRUMENT SOFTWARE

By embracing these we can improve the use, analysis, presentation and understanding of iconographic material. The principles above are greatly influenced by those of Open Science.

Improved Data Analysis and Presentation – to promote better data analysis, and enable consumers of research to better understand the context of a data analysis.

Reproducibility – to enable data sets to be re-created reliably and quickly, and encourage Open Methodology so that any analysis can be repeated and verified independently by anyone, anywhere in the world,.

Data Sharing – to encourage researchers to share images and metadata of primary sources, and in the longer term to share analysis data (a move towards Open Data),.

Reliable Referencing – to reference every item in the corpus, down to each individual research target (bow, instrument and bowed instrument musician) that is depicted, guaranteeing that a reference resolves to iconography,.

Unified Corpus – to collect images of primary sources that depict any bowed stringed instrument along with associated metadata into a single place, available under Open Access to researchers as a living data set which continues to be updated,.

There are five core principles I want to support and promote: By mid 2015 this website and a global iconography database featured in the plans with the aim of solving some of the problems of musicology research and to bring some of the principles of scientific method to iconographic research. So alongside my own research, I decided to be a catalyst for change in the way things are done, and to help improve iconographic research. These experiences led me to look at the mechanics of research, how the outcomes of research are affected by human factors, and how we present data. What was more frustrating was that I was treading a path that to a fair extent has already been trodden many times, and despite today’s computing environment these basic problems have not been addressed. What I wasn’t prepared for when I started out, was how difficult the data was to acquire, with a multitude of problems, such as requiring physical access to vast libraries, or references that are impossible to resolve.

LARGE BOWED STRING INSTRUMENT SOFTWARE

With my background in software engineering, the storage and processing of large data sets is merely an every day task. Answering these questions requires a lot of primary source data. I focus on some of the big questions I am interested in how the instruments and bows developed, where and when they appear, disappear about changes in their morphology and features over time across large geographic areas.

The project started as personal research project in September 2014 when I started to formalise my research efforts. My research is the macrohistory of bowed stringed instruments. Curators are experts in the field of bowed string instruments, ensuring that the databases provide consistent and quality data and information. Intended as an academic quality research tool, data sources are referenced as much as possible and hyperlinks provided. The project provides two high quality databases one containing sources of bowed string instrument iconography and associated images, the other containing archaeological sources. The databases are curated, in a similar manner to museums and galleries. The Bowed Strings Iconography Project (BSIP) is a non-profit non-commercial research project that aims to collate and catalogue as many iconographic and archaeological sources of bowed string instruments, bows, their parts and accessories as possible throughout all periods of history through to the present day.

Large bowed string instrument