Chant manuscripts of the Central Library of the Viennese Franciscan Province in Graz
funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport , “Kulturerbe Digital” programme.
Project management: PD Dr. Robert Klugseder (Department of Musicology, ACDH).
Responsible for digital data processing: Mag. Daniel Schopper (Department of DH Research & Infrastructure, ACDH).
Manuscript and print digitisation: Jakob Leitner.
Ground truth creation: Michael Haderer (layout), Anna-Lena Huber, Matthias Pertiller and Moritz Schmoetten (music notation).
Partners: Franciscan Monastery Graz, Read Coop SCE Innsbruck and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Franz Karl Praßl, Graz.
To the image viewer of the chant manuscripts · To the text search in the chant manuscripts
The aim of this project was to digitise 54 late-medieval and early-modern chant manuscripts, chant organ books and rare chant prints held at the Central Library of the Franciscans in Graz. The approximately 18,000 images produced were enriched with metadata and made available online via an IIIF interface, both for the virtual library Europeana and for www.cantusplanus.at. The data is archived for the long term in the ACDH repository ARCHE.
Part of the project was an automated transcription of the chant texts and rubrics using the AI-based application Transkribus. For this purpose, various models were trained for recognising the complex layout and for text transcription, which subsequently made it possible to “translate” many of the digitised codices into modern script automatically. The machine-generated transcriptions contain errors, but they do allow for extensive searchability of the sources.
The digitised sources are of considerable significance for musicology and liturgical studies and also for art history (notable book illumination), and thus represent important monuments of Austria’s cultural heritage. Complete digitisation provides both images of the sources and full-text search of the chants. Through its expertise in digitisation, the ACDH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences ensures a high standard, both in the production of the images, in the creation of the manuscript descriptions, in metadata management, in the online visualisation of the results, and in long-term archiving.
In a parallel sub-project funded by the ACDH, suitable chant manuscripts from the Franciscan corpus and choir books previously digitised for www.cantusplanus.at were used to develop automated, AI-based notation recognition. Building on the findings of the Franciscan project, a web application for Optical Text and Music Recognition was developed that allows not only the chant texts but also the melodies of the chants to be transcribed automatically. The project partner here is Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza and his team at the University of Alicante (Spain).