Search engine for music incipits honored
At the Digital Humanities World Conference in Mexico 2018, the web application IncipitSearch was awarded the prestigious Paul Fortier Prize. The prize is awarded for the best digital humanities project by young scientists from around the world.
IncipitSearch is a search engine for music incipits that can be used to search music catalogs and music editions. Incipits are the first bars of a musical text that can be used to identify melodies. The starting point for IncipitSearch was the development of an incipit search for the digital catalog of the historical-critical edition "Christoph Willibald Gluck - Sämtliche Werke".
IncipitSearch links open music repositories. It is both a search engine with over 900,000 entries and a service that can be linked back to other directories and editions. IncipitSearch makes all data available as Linked Open Data for further use.
The application was developed by Anna Neovesky and Frederic von Vlahovits.
Neovesky is deputy director of the Digital Academy, a digital humanities research institute of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. She studied computer science, medieval history, modern and contemporary history in Leipzig and Würzburg and is doing her doctorate at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Von Vlahovits is a research associate at the Digital Academy. He studied Film Studies and Musicology in Mainz and is currently working on his doctorate at Johannes Gutenberg University.
The Paul Fortier Prize, endowed with 500 British pounds (660 Swiss francs), is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) named after Paul Fortier (1939-2005), professor at the University of Manitoba (Canada). The award honors his long, active work in the field of digital humanities and is a special reminder of his encouragement and support for young scholars in the field.
Link to the application: https://incipitsearch.adwmainz.net/
