Data Fields–Some questions to consider
Questions:
- What to do with compositions that are longer than one page?
- What to do with works having conflicting attributions?
- Do we imagine that scholars will want to study questions of mode and/or tonal type? Can tonal types simply be from a list, as one field, or as they are here? If only tonal types, will that limit searches (by final, for example)?
- What other fields would we need if (eventually) the database is expanded to (for example) motets, madrigals?
February 16th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Mode and/or tonal type: I would hesitate to list “by mode” since so much of this literature doesn’t conform well. Yet at the same time, the question of “modal ordering” (or at least ordering by tonal type) is one of the basic queries we bring to the repertoire. IN other words, SOMETHING needs to be there, but you’re right, we don’t know yet what that something would be.
Final and whether there’s a flat was what you suggested; I rather like that approach because it’s objective. One question, though: are signatures ever variable in this literature, and if so what would we do with a mixed-signature piece?