Database: Sedimentation in audio-visual documents

"[N]arrating is an indispensable operation which at the same time performs and reveals the intrinsic mediality of our relation to the (our) world.
Consequently, narration is a crucial topic of every media theory."

Zit. S Siegfried J. Schmidt: Telling Stories about Storytelling (2008)

 

Music contexts arise in numerous and very different ways in the documents we use. In order to establish relationships among them beyond the limits of the various collections and document types, the people, places, institutions, times, events and musical repertoires in each document are compiled in a new RDF-based database. This compilation assumes a certain “sedimentation” of the individual document and its layers of meaning and media. The aforementioned categories can be directly involved in the creation of the document or can be mentioned or heard in it. In documents that represent collages of different acoustic, visual or audio-visual documents, the various elements of the collages might refer to different times, institutions, events, locations, people and repertoires, which may challenge a linear understanding of history itself when presented together. For the sedimentation of the documents, a combination of analytical methods taken from oral history, media and film studies, music analysis and performance studies is employed.