Visual Analysis of Linked Musicological Data with the musiXplora

While digitizing data is the first major step for many digital humanities projects, the visual analysis is of high value for humanists, as it brings a wide range of possibilities to work with data. While rather traditional analysis often concentrates on standalone or sets of information (close reading), global inspections of linked data are also requested by today’s researchers and made possible through digital processing. Hence, distance reading approaches are more and more found in humanities projects. Next to such approaches allowing new research questions of quantitative analysis, linking previously separate information on a data level is another way of providing humanists with access to further, previously not reachable, global inspections of faceted datasets. As a domain with both, faceted data and a rather low level of digitization, musicology is a prime example of how the digital humanities may improve and support the daily workflows of humanists. Despite the generally low level of digitization, multiple projects already build a basis to help in digitizing the field. As an example, the musiXplora project collected a vast amount of musicological data throughout the last 16 years and now offers both, a detailed biography of persons, places, objects, events, media, institutions and terms and also the linkage between these kinds of entities to help in giving a user a comprehensible overview in the traditionally fragmented field of musicology. Supported by a set of visualizations, the website of the project allows for visual analysis on close reading and distant reading levels. This does not only help researchers in their daily workflows but also offers users with a more casual nature an interesting view inside the domain of musicology.