Project Methodology

Technical infrastructure



Project Praxis

The Burns Antiphoner is an interactive and open access resource with a dynamic presentation layer through which content (metadata, music notation, textual incipits) and multimedia based on the encoded inventory and data from a 14th-century Franciscan antiphoner can be queried and viewed. The manuscript has 119 parchment folios with text and notation for antiphons and responsories for the entire annual calendar of saints’ days.

We are using and developing on open source applications and standards to structure and encode data with MEI/XML, to output data as IIIF manifests and JSON, to ingest and render data, with an IIIF image server and Lunr.js search index, and to present with user interfaces built on Diva.js and Jekyll. We aim to support further development in the OS community by sharing our documentation, code, and data in GitHub, and have contributed our data to the scholarly community through collaboration with CANTUS Database (CDB).

This project has created many data outputs to enable continued exploration and future work. Data outputted in JSON, including the IIIF manifests and incipit data, will enable us to explore ways in which to re-arrange, search, and view images side-by-side for comparison of scribal hands and other unique features (on a multitouch table), as well as to create or view annotations and to compare our source material against other manuscripts with IIIF manifests. Data encoded in MEI/XML will allow us to explore options for rendering neume notation using Verovio, rather than in Volpiano font.