Research

• DIAMM
• MusDig
• Creative Practice in Contemporary Concert Music (CPCCM)
• Composition & Performance
• Ethnomusicology
• Musicology
• Psychology of Music
• Oxford-Princeton Partnership
• Conferences
• Research Blogs

DIAMM

The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) is one of the world's leading scholarly digitisation projects. The Project Manager acts as a consultant for a wide variety of digitization initiatives worldwide, including the National Library of Ireland digitization programme, the Israel Antiquities Authority Dead Sea Scrolls digitization initiative, and various projects in which the highest quality of digital imaging and image management is required.

With a growing online collection of (currently) nearly 15,000 images all freely available to view on the internet, the project seeks both to conserve and make widely available high-quality digital images of European music manuscripts from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Scholars and students can make public and private annotations to images as well as create saved custom collections of sources to aid in their research, and the database will soon provide a searchable piece-by-piece inventory of the more than 2600 manuscripts indexed by the project.

Founded by Dr Margaret Bent and Prof Andrew Wathey in 1998, the project is managed by one of its directors, Dr Julia Craig-McFeely (Research Fellow in the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford) and now enjoys close integration with the Bodleian Library through one of its Associate Directors, Dr Martin Kauffmann, who is co-I on the current AHRC grant along with Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste (University of Bangor). The principal grant-holder is Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach (Faculty of Music and St. Hugh's College, Oxford). Leading scholars in the field, and those intimately involved with manuscript study and conservaton in the major research libraries in the UK also contribute generously to the project in their capacity as directors and associate directors.

In addition to the manuscripts, the online resource provides access to images of the two major manuscript catalogues dealing with sources from this period - RISM and the Census Catalogue - with searchable electronic versions of their content for all the manuscripts they list. Since the publication of these catalogues, numerous new sources have come to light, and DIAMM is currently the most comprehensive access point for information and listings of all known manuscripts. The content is updated regularly, and scholarly contributions are acknowledged.

The project is currently funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and the AHRC, who support the extensive technical work necessary to maintain this exceptional resource, and also the development and growth of the online content and access to it. All technical work is done by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at King's College London under the direction of the technical co-PI on the Mellon grant, Professor Marilyn Deegan.

Full details of the project, reports on seminars and studies, explanations of techniques of digital restoration used by the project, information about partner projects and, of course, access to the images can be found here.