Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE)

OCVE began as an eighteen-month pilot study, from May 2003 to October 2004. Its aim was to explore the potential of technology to trascend the limitations of a traditional printed variorum edition. The research exploited emerging technical capacities for text/image comparison as well as recent musicological advances in cognate projects such as Chopin's First Editions Online and the Annotated catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (Cambridge University Press, 2007). This pilot phase resulted in a prototype online environment allowing soources to be consulted and compared at bar level, and featuring web-based annotation.
The second phase builds on this prototype work in many ways, introducing hundreds of new sources, and a complex workflow involving optical music recognition technology which semi-automatically processes pages of manuscript and printed musical scores into individual bars. These bar images are accessible to the user within an advanced interface which allows for close study and visual comparison of practically any number of sources on a bar-by-bar basis, together with a powerful annotation tool, a lightbox function, and significant new contextual materials.