About the Portal
The web portal Lidové prameny (Folk Sources) serves as a comprehensive platform for accessing an extensive collection of folk songs, music, and dance recordings, which was created as part of research conducted by the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, its institutional predecessors, and other institutions. The portal provides access to collected data on historical sources (manuscripts, prints, recordings), thus facilitating the search for information on musical and dance folklore records.
The public access level allows users to search for and display song units according to basic criteria such as text or melodic incipit (usually the first verse and the corresponding beginning of the melody), source author (collector or publisher), location and region of recording, time of recording, or type of dance. The portal displays musical notation, a scan of the source, or a digitised recording of the data found. The portal thus provides the public with an easy overview of song records that are difficult to access by other means. The system also provides tools for more detailed searching and comparison of sources and song units, including the possibility of grouping and filtering musical and dance material according to various criteria based on the analysis performed (in the field of music, e.g., the range of the song, the highest and lowest notes in a given key, the number of bars, and musical form; in the field of dance, e.g., number of dancers, dance motives, type of hold, etc.).
Songs
Digitised sources are processed as song units. This refers to the notation of song lyrics, the notation of a song melody with lyrics, the notation of an instrumental melody, or the recording of a dance within a specific source. During cataloguing, we describe the source (manuscript, print, recording) and its song units separately. The cataloguing of musical sources, i.e., collections of songs and instrumental melodies, includes the digitization of the notation and a comprehensive musical analysis according to the system of Lubomír Tyllner and Zdeněk Vejvoda (Česká lidová píseň. Historie, analýza, typologie, 2019). Importing this data to the portal makes it possible to search for a specific song by key and meter or by entering part of the melody on a virtual keyboard or by audio input – whistling, singing, or playing the melody on a musical instrument. This also makes it possible to play a simplified version of the melody.
Sources
A source is a handwritten, printed, or audio (visual) recording of one or more song units (a so-called collection corpus) with bibliographic data or place of storage and signature. For cataloguing purposes, a source is further divided into song units. For cataloguing purposes, we assign a unique code to each source. Typically, the source code contains an abbreviation of the collector’s name and an abbreviation of the source title. The choice of source code is based on established practice; the codes for Czech sources are summarised in the Průvodce po pramenech lidových písní, hudby a tanců v Čechách (Tyllner, Traxler a Thořová 2015).
Within a single source, each song unit usually has only one melody and one text variant. If more than one song unit is included under a single number, they usually differ in text (sometimes also in melody or location of the recording). In such cases, we choose the number selected by the author for the first song unit and append letters in ascending order in square brackets to this number ([b], [c], etc). In some cases, the author of the source did not use numbering in some sections, or used it confusingly, so it is not possible to identify the song unit in the source or part of it. In this case, we introduce custom numbering system for cataloguing song units, based on the order of the songs in the source, or based on the numbering of pages in the source (the song number then consists of the page number of the source and the letter indicating the order of the song unit on that page). Additional or custom numbering is indicated by enclosing the song unit number or its part in square brackets.
Locations and regions
The location and region of the recording are usually given for both the source and the specific song unit. The Lidové prameny portal uses this information to display song units on a map. It is based on the mapping of locations and regions to points represented by GPS coordinates or to the name of the municipality or part thereof. The source database for mapping is a publicly available list of municipalities and their parts, including their classification into districts and regions of the Czech Republic. The portal automatically assigns the locations and regions listed for individual song units to the source that contains these song units.
The portal was created as part of the project Folk Songs and Dances of the Czech Lands – a Digital System for Access and Preservation supported by the program for the promotion of applied research and experimental development of national and cultural identity for the years 2016–2022, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, DG18P02OVV053; 2018–2022, in cooperation with the National Institute of Folk Culture in Strážnice.
Project team: Matěj Kratochvíl, Lubomír Tyllner, Daniela Stavělová, Zdeněk Vejvoda, Lucie Uhlíková, Marta Toncrová, Marek Janata, Jiří Höhn
Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences
National Institute of Folk Culture in Strážnice
Collections
♫ Songs
