Methodology

Our project dataset consists of around 2,617 collations: note-by-note comparisons of all extant eighteenth-century witnesses of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas with a designated baseline text which we call the control.

This section explains the spreadsheet Header fields used to record witness metadata, notation, ornamentation, and other textual features, clarifying how these details were documented across the project.

This section explains how variants were recorded in the Bars section through a consistent, machine-readable notation system that captures note-by-note differences between each witness and the control.

This section defines the project’s 16 main variant categories and 62 specific notation types used to classify and describe textual differences between witnesses and the control.

This section outlines how the project identified, acquired, indexed, and processed surviving Scarlatti witnesses using catalogues, CSV metadata files, and the Copycutter script to organise collections into individual sonata files.

The 2,617 collations were completed in phases by team members and freelance research assistants using bespoke tools and workflows, then carefully validated to ensure accuracy and consistency.

This section explains how computational tools and a variant dictionary were used to validate, categorise, and convert the project’s large dataset of Scarlatti variants for further analysis and phylogenetic research.

This section explains how users can analyse the Texting Scarlatti dataset either through a beginner-friendly Google Colab tutorial series or by using the project’s GitHub scripts and data directly.