MusiXplora: Visual analysis of a musicological encyclopedia

Making large sets of digitized cultural heritage data accessible is a key task for digitization projects. While the amount of data available through print media is vast in humanities, common issues arise as information available for the digitization process is typically fragmented. One reason is the physical distribution of data through print media that has to be collected and merged. Especially, merging causes issues due to differences in terminology, hampering automatic processing. Hence, digitizing musicological data raises a broad range of challenges. In this paper, we present the current state of the on-going musiXplora project, including a multi-faceted database and a visual exploration system for persons, places, objects, terms, media, events, and institutions of musicological interest. A particular focus of the project is using visualizations to overcome traditional problems of handling both, vast amounts and anomalies of information induced by the historicity of data. We present several use cases that highlight the capabilities of the system to support musicologists in their daily workflows.