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Announcing My Blog, Songs of the Victorians, and Augmented Notes

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I’ve been having an excellent and productive time as a Scholars’ Lab Fellow: thanks to the amazing advice and support I’ve received from the Scholars’ Lab staff, I’ve been making good progress on my two digital projects, Songs of the Victorians and Augmented Notes. For those of you who don’t know about them, I’ll give you a brief summery:

Songs of the Victorians, which I’ve written about before here and here, is an archive and analysis of parlor and art song settings of Victorian poems.  I specialize in Victorian poetry and its intersections with music, and this project I’m building helps me in my interdisciplinary work.  For the four songs I include, users can examine an archive page with high resolution scans of the 1st edition printing of the score and an audio file of the work; when users click the audio file, each measure is highlighted in time with the music so scholars who can’t read music can still follow along.  Each song also has an analysis component, in which I include an essay on the music’s interpretation of the text, and users can click on parenthetical notes that occur after descriptions of the effect of a particular musical passage, and the relevant measures of the score will become highlighted in time with the music.  In case an image will make it more tantalizing, here’s the “Coming Soon” page that’s live on the web:

Songs of the Victorians "Coming Soon" page

Augmented Notes, which is not yet live, is a tool that will help users generate their own sites like Songs of the Victorians.  Users will upload a scan, audio file, and MEI file and then follow simple instructions to output css, html, and javascript template files that they can then alter to make their own complete interdisciplinary site.

If you’re interested in learning more about either of these projects or in how I’m building them, I have a blog, Anglophile in Academia, where I post updates.  I write a new post every Monday, and I’d love to hear comments and feedback from all of you!

If you don’t know where to jump in, here are some highlights so far:

Progress reportHere’s where I announce the date of the sneak-peak release of Songs of the Victorians.

Content:  If you’re interested in the content of the analysis pages for Songs of the Victorians, read this post on Caroline Norton’s song “Juanita.”

DesignHere’s my most recent post on designing the homepage and song display page for Songs of the Victorians, here’s a post on the redesign of Songs of the Victorians and the rationale behind it, and here’s my post about logo designs for both sites.

I’ll be making my weekly updates for the rest of the semester (and beyond), so make sure to subscribe or check it out every week!

Cite this post: Annie Swafford. “Announcing My Blog, Songs of the Victorians, and Augmented Notes”. Published February 26, 2013. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/announcing-my-blog-songs-of-the-victorians-and-augmented-notes/. Accessed on .