About the Project
This project features a selection of primary source materials, such as advertisements, announcements, and reviews from newspapers, with descriptions or annotations in order to document Carreño's career from 1862 - 1917.
A selection of Carreño's tours are displayed geographically on a map allowing users to explore primary sources or artifacts related to specific events. By making this content available broadly, I hope to enable other scholars, students, and the public to learn more about Carreño's career, as well as use these primary sources to ask questions and explore new aspects about her career as a pianist and composer.
This project is meant to be collaborative and encourages students, scholars, and the public to contribute information about Carreño's performances.
If you have questions, suggestions, or would like to contribute to this resource, please contact Anna Kijas, Tufts University (anna.kijas at tufts.edu). New content is still being added to this site and edits or new features will appear as necessary.
Organization
Each Item Record in Documenting Teresa Carreño is based on a documented performance given by Carreño between 1862 and 1917.
A brief annotation is provided with the following metadata for each performance (when known):
- Date
- Time
- Venue
- Address/Location
- Title of Composition
- Composer Name
- Musician [i.e. artist, conductor] or Ensemble Name
- Source [i.e. concert review, advertisement] when available, a URL or file is provided to the digital object
RISM Library sigla are provided when archival materials are identified in the source field.
In addition to the annotation and metadata, a transcription is provided when available or users can request to transcribe documents that have a PDF or Image of text associated with a performance.
Each Item Record is part of a Collection, which groups performances according to time period and geographic location. Each performance includes tags for year, venue, composition title, composer name, musician/ensemble name, and location.
Users can run full-text searches across the content, including PDFs and text documents, using keywords, names, subjects, and tags. Users can also browse across all performances, search specific performances based on geographic location and chronological period, search by specific venue, or view select performances on a map and timeline.
Technical Aspects
Documenting Teresa Carreño is built on Omeka v.2.7.1, an open-source content management and publishing platform. This instance is installed on a server, which is run and maintained by Reclaim Hosting. The site is currently running the Thanks, Roy theme with slight customizations to the original source code.
The following plugins are installed and used by this site:
The Scripto plugin is being used in this project to create transcriptions of performance reception of Carreño’s concerts. It provides a collaborative space for crowd-sourcing transcriptions, as well as editing and reviewing transcribed documents through MediaWiki.
The Neatline plugin was used with a previous Omeka version (2.3) to create geo-spatial and temporal visualizations to depict Carreño’s concert tours using maps and timelines. Location data based on her concert appearances was geocoded using a programming language called Ruby and converted them to WKT (Well-known-text), which is a text markup language used to represent vector geometry objects on a map, such as the one in Neatline. (See: http://www.annakijas.com/adventures-in-geocoding-for-neatline/)
Controlled vocabulary, based on the Name Authority Files in the Library of Congress Linked Data, as well as Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is being used to ensure that names of composers and compositions titles are consistent and accurately represented.