Announcing Augmented Notes!

Hi, readers!

It's been an exciting week for the development of Songs of the Victorians and its corollary project, Augmented Notes!  

First, though, here's some background on Songs of the Victorians for those of you want a summary of the links I posted last week: it's an archive of parlor and art song settings of Victorian poems that I'm building in conjunction with my dissertation.  It contains four songs:  Michael William Balfe's "Come into the Garden, Maud" and Sir Arthur Somervell's "Come into the Garden, Maud" (both based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's monodrama, Maud), Sir Arthur Sullivan's version of Adelaide Procter's "A Lost Chord," and Caroline Norton's "Juanita." It includes high resolution images of the first edition printings of each song as well as an audio file.  It also has a scholarly component in which each song includes an analysis of the song's interpretation of the poem, with excerpts of the phrases I discuss to support my argument.  Users can click on the excerpts to play them, and the score is highlighted in time with the music so that everyone, regardless of their ability to follow a score, can follow the thread of my argument.

Augmented Notes is a new project I'm working on, which I actually haven't written about or announced in public yet: I'm developing a tool that will help scholars build their own sites like Songs of the Victorians!  Users will upload jpegs of the scores they want to use, an audio file (in mp3 and ogg formats), and an mei file (an xml markup for music, rather akin to tei) that records the measure bounds of the song in question.  They can then go through a simple process of inputting measure times (clicking the "save" button at the end of every measure) and selecting the desired excerpts, and Augmented Notes will output the javascript, css, and html files necessary for their very own site.  I hope this tool will help other scholars work on the interdisciplinary projects they have in mind.

So far, I'm still on schedule for both projects:  I've built most of Songs of the Victorians, which I'm now converting to a Flask application, and I've built the time selector and excerpt selector page for Augmented Notes.  I also purchased domain names for both tools (songsofthevictorians.com and augmentednotes.com), although I haven't put any content there yet. The most exciting news of the week is that I've now received the scans of the final score I needed, and permission from the British record label Hyperion Records (http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/) to use audio files of the songs from their cds free of charge!  This news means that I can push forward the release date of Songs of the Victorians earlier than originally planned:  I hope to unveil a preview of my site, using Caroline Norton's "Juanita" as an example, by the end of February/beginning of March in conjunction with a paper I'm presenting at INCS (http://incs2013.nines.org/), the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies conference, held in Charlottesville in mid-March.  Stay tuned for an actual release date!