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15 09 22 Meeting Minutes
Present:
- Anna Plaksin
- Giuliano Di Bacco
- Christian Goursaud
- David Rizo
- Joshua Stutter
- Michael Friebel
Apologies: Klaus Rettinghaus
(aims, scopes of the IGs, relationship between the IGs and the TC, workflows) Discussion on how this is relevant to us and what to propose to the community.
The Community meeting took place because various parts of the community observed recent difficulties in requesting changes in the specification of MEI. We came to the realization that we need improvement. The meeting happened at 21 July. Suggestions have been provided in the form of short sentences to the TT/Board and will be digested. A follow-up meeting should take place in a few weeks. Attendance by mensural IG meeting would be important.
The agenda at 21 July was:
- Relations of different members/groups within the MEI Community
- Discussions and decision-making processes on MEI GitHub repositories
- New, active, pending, stale? – Issues and pull requests on MEI GitHub repositories
- Modelling issues – limits of encoding, customizations vs. official schemata, correspondence of MEI to TEI
The first two points were unexpectedly more popular. Most time of the workshop was spent writing notes and there was no time to discuss the issues.
- Agreement: visual & logical structure.
- June’s meeting was a starting point of a new discussion on how much we need to solve the apparent misunderstanding of our goals from the rest of the community. It appears that we need a new strategy…
- One suggestion was to prepare a digest of the amount of discussion that we put into the complex mensurations/proportions, that was not implemented. The aim of this digest would be to make sure that everybody understands the goals that we had in mind and the kind of criticism that we received.
- Anna’s digest (report) LINK is just a draft.
- A critical point is the opinion that was expressed by many that MEI is not a visual encoding, but there may be a question here of whether we should re-define what exactly we (as MEI community as a whole) mean by “visual” and “logic”. It appears that we (mensuralists, or early music people) intend these two words in a different way.
- Conclusion: should we perhaps try to explain that what we intend by visual is something intrinsic to the notation, not just an added layer to something that has a logic already.
- Anna’s proposal is don’t speak about “visual” anymore since the word has a special significance to the MEI architecture
- Some symbols (like the Spanish Z) can be included as symbol (throug SMUFL) but the
- Joshua: citing from the Guidelines, in most MEI encoding, most of what is written down has already a logical meaning. We need to make very clear that encoding is always editing, not making a facsimile. David: we use MEI also to capture the results of an automatic recognition. Anna: it is not about preserving the written symbol but also to classify what has happened to that page, which is still interpretation but more linked to the symbolic aspect.
- Also in modern notation there are similar occurrencies: C and 4/4
- in MEI 5 we already made some changes in the domains. Put them back in logical? The differences that we see between what is logica/visual in CMS and Mensural still reveals that there is some background misunderstanding…
- coloration is another feature that is visual but carries some logic
- May a triplet without the number 3 may be misunderstanded?
- Michael: imperfection and alteration, another point of visual ambiguity
- We could even talk about multiple logical layers
- All in all, Anna proposes to talk about symbolic, instead of visual
- Michael points out that there are cases where the symbol has no special meaning
- Giuliano: Do I understand correctly that the word symbol would lead to the same problem of not being meaningful enough… can something be “not symbolic” in a rhythmical sense? We are trying to find a special way to communicate by avoiding the term visual because it carries too much history in terms of how domains are intended within our own community.
- Michael says that whatever word we use, we should define it… the problem is when the meaning of a symbol is “we don’t know”
- David: if a symbol (note) can have multiple interpretations, it is possible to use
Link to the notes: Draft notes of digest
The idea is to write a statement illustrating what exactly we intend to do for everybody; what the Mensural IG’s place is in the community. especially with respect to other IGs. The immediate goal is to make plans on how to prepare such a statement. Might seem artificial/unnecessary, but MEI is likely to require a statement of intent. Historically, at MEC2, the IG’s purpose was unclear. Avoid chaos by stating clearly the purpose of each IG. Presents an opportunity to communicate the specific phenomena the IG exists to capture. Goals include some form of mission statement plus a something approaching a constitution.
This could be difficult. Perhaps individuals could write their own statements in advance of synthesising the common elements to form a consensus.
Interface between Neume & Mensural IGs in terms of special approaches to logical/symbolic/visual.
Possible questions:
- What is your research interest? (What would you like to achieve using MEI mensural?)
- What is in your opinion different in encoding mensural notation from CMN?
- Why do we need an interest group to encode things that are not yet possible in MEI?
postponed to next meeting
Christian Goursaud asks about how to encode text not as standard lyrics but as a different “vague text”. Anna answers that not it’s not possible now. He asks about how to encode latin abbreviations. Anna: it may be encoded with some unicode symbols
Proposal for interaction between Mensural & Neume IGs.
AP mentioned paper about indeterimate Armenian notation. JS mentioned OCR of Notre Dame repertory.
Next meeting: same time on 17 November 2022 TBC