{ "title": "Read the gaps as carefully as the data — Pipe Organ Dataset", "text": "MODAVIS (2026). Read the gaps as carefully as the data — Pipe Organ Dataset. Research notebooks, September 2026 · research guides edition. https://modavis.org/editions/2026-09-r4/dataset/limits/", "bibtex": "@misc{modavis_dataset_limits_2026_09_r4,\n author = {{MODAVIS}},\n title = {Read the gaps as carefully as the data — Pipe Organ Dataset},\n year = {2026},\n month = {09},\n version = {2026-09-r4},\n url = {https://modavis.org/editions/2026-09-r4/dataset/limits/},\n note = {Content SHA-256: 34c05b5da0ecdec0bfe6d86cc085d75dfb112c06581f7b4995bd43e1ceb5a25d}\n}", "url": "https://modavis.org/editions/2026-09-r4/dataset/limits/", "sha256": "34c05b5da0ecdec0bfe6d86cc085d75dfb112c06581f7b4995bd43e1ceb5a25d", "edition": "2026-09-r4", "date": "2026-09-26", "canonicalPayload": "{\"book\":{\"number\":\"05\",\"slug\":\"dataset\",\"title\":\"Pipe Organ Dataset\"},\"chapter\":{\"blocks\":[{\"id\":\"historical-state\",\"text\":\"Historical state\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"An account may have a publication date without establishing the date of the configuration it describes. Avoid turning an undated observation into a precise chronology.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"id\":\"identity\",\"text\":\"Identity and relationships\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"Shared names and similar specifications can suggest a relationship without proving identity. Unresolved actor or represented-instrument links should remain unresolved in downstream analysis unless additional evidence supports a decision.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"id\":\"geography\",\"text\":\"Geographic precision\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"Coordinates can refer to locations at different levels of precision. Preserve coordinate qualifications and administrative evidence when making maps or spatial comparisons.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"id\":\"counts\",\"text\":\"Counts and occurrences\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"A source-account row is not necessarily a unique physical component. For example, multiple accounts may describe the same stop at different times. Count the unit that your question actually concerns.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"text\":\"No recorded stoplist, builder or media item can mean that the source did not provide it. It does not establish that the instrument lacked that feature.\",\"title\":\"Missing is not absent\",\"type\":\"note\"},{\"id\":\"missing-values\",\"text\":\"Missing values have different causes\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"headers\":[\"Situation\",\"Careful interpretation\"],\"rows\":[[\"No stoplist in a source\",\"The source does not provide a list; the instrument is not thereby described as having no stops.\"],[\"An unresolved builder link\",\"An attribution is present but has not been linked confidently to a canonical actor.\"],[\"An undated specification\",\"A description exists, but its applicability to a configuration date remains uncertain.\"],[\"An approximate location\",\"The available evidence supports a geographic scope less precise than a surveyed point.\"]],\"type\":\"table\"},{\"text\":\"Keep these distinctions through transformations. Converting all missing values to zero, attaching an arbitrary year or resolving every name by its nearest spelling can make a table easier to compute while changing its meaning. If a method requires complete cases, document the selection rule and assess which sources or regions it disproportionately removes.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"id\":\"source-dependence\",\"text\":\"Repeated accounts are not independent witnesses\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"Agreement across records can be valuable, but sources may copy one another or derive from a shared earlier account. Count supporting records separately from independent evidence. When the transmission relationship is unknown, that uncertainty belongs in the interpretation rather than being replaced by a simple majority vote.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"id\":\"bounded-comparison\",\"text\":\"A bounded comparison is often more useful\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"For a comparison of specifications, choose a documented unit, date scope and inclusion rule before interpreting differences. Report both what the selected corpus supports and what it cannot answer. A bounded result about attributed accounts can be strong research without claiming to describe every surviving instrument or its present condition.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"text\":\"Where an unresolved choice could affect the conclusion, compare reasonable alternative selections or interpretations and retain the results. The difference between them can be more informative than a single unqualified estimate.\",\"title\":\"Sensitivity as a research habit\",\"type\":\"note\"},{\"id\":\"coverage-example\",\"text\":\"One coverage statistic, carefully bounded\",\"type\":\"heading\"},{\"text\":\"For POD 1.6.0, 143,880 of 215,769 canonical organs have stop accounts: approximately 66.7 percent. This describes presence of that category of documentation in the specified release. It does not assess whether each account is complete, whether multiple accounts concern the same state, or how well the corpus represents all historical organs. The 3,604,579 public stop rows use another counting unit and must not be substituted for a count of physical stops.\",\"type\":\"p\"},{\"items\":[{\"detail\":\"Denominators, source coverage, nomenclature and workshop networks.\",\"href\":\"/notebooks/dataset/questions/\",\"label\":\"Ask a question the corpus can answer\"}],\"type\":\"links\"}],\"intro\":\"Incomplete knowledge is part of the dataset’s meaning.\",\"slug\":\"limits\",\"sources\":[{\"detail\":\"The fixed dataset release, methods and checksums.\",\"href\":\"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22308263\",\"label\":\"Pipe Organ Dataset 1.6.0\"},{\"detail\":\"Dissertation submitted to Universität Leipzig, 11 September 2026. Chapters 1–6 and 8; Appendix I.4 for the software and resource inventory. See the dedicated research guides for claim-specific section references. Page numbers refer to the printed manuscript pagination. The manuscript is not distributed by this website.\",\"label\":\"Dominik Ukolov · Musikinstrumente im virtuellen Raum (2026)\"},{\"detail\":\"Public versioned corpus and distributions. Counts and coverage in these notebooks refer to this release.\",\"href\":\"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22308263\",\"label\":\"Pipe Organ Dataset 1.6.0\"},{\"detail\":\"Dissertation submitted to Universität Leipzig, 11 September 2026. §§4.1–4.3; §8.3.2. Page numbers refer to the printed manuscript pagination. The manuscript is not distributed by this website.\",\"label\":\"Dominik Ukolov · Musikinstrumente im virtuellen Raum (2026)\"}],\"title\":\"Read the gaps as carefully as the data\"},\"date\":\"2026-09-26\",\"edition\":\"2026-09-r4\",\"figures\":{}}", "payload": { "edition": "2026-09-r4", "date": "2026-09-26", "book": { "slug": "dataset", "title": "Pipe Organ Dataset", "number": "05" }, "chapter": { "slug": "limits", "title": "Read the gaps as carefully as the data", "intro": "Incomplete knowledge is part of the dataset’s meaning.", "blocks": [ { "type": "heading", "text": "Historical state", "id": "historical-state" }, { "type": "p", "text": "An account may have a publication date without establishing the date of the configuration it describes. Avoid turning an undated observation into a precise chronology." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "Identity and relationships", "id": "identity" }, { "type": "p", "text": "Shared names and similar specifications can suggest a relationship without proving identity. Unresolved actor or represented-instrument links should remain unresolved in downstream analysis unless additional evidence supports a decision." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "Geographic precision", "id": "geography" }, { "type": "p", "text": "Coordinates can refer to locations at different levels of precision. Preserve coordinate qualifications and administrative evidence when making maps or spatial comparisons." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "Counts and occurrences", "id": "counts" }, { "type": "p", "text": "A source-account row is not necessarily a unique physical component. For example, multiple accounts may describe the same stop at different times. Count the unit that your question actually concerns." }, { "type": "note", "title": "Missing is not absent", "text": "No recorded stoplist, builder or media item can mean that the source did not provide it. It does not establish that the instrument lacked that feature." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "Missing values have different causes", "id": "missing-values" }, { "type": "table", "headers": [ "Situation", "Careful interpretation" ], "rows": [ [ "No stoplist in a source", "The source does not provide a list; the instrument is not thereby described as having no stops." ], [ "An unresolved builder link", "An attribution is present but has not been linked confidently to a canonical actor." ], [ "An undated specification", "A description exists, but its applicability to a configuration date remains uncertain." ], [ "An approximate location", "The available evidence supports a geographic scope less precise than a surveyed point." ] ] }, { "type": "p", "text": "Keep these distinctions through transformations. Converting all missing values to zero, attaching an arbitrary year or resolving every name by its nearest spelling can make a table easier to compute while changing its meaning. If a method requires complete cases, document the selection rule and assess which sources or regions it disproportionately removes." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "Repeated accounts are not independent witnesses", "id": "source-dependence" }, { "type": "p", "text": "Agreement across records can be valuable, but sources may copy one another or derive from a shared earlier account. Count supporting records separately from independent evidence. When the transmission relationship is unknown, that uncertainty belongs in the interpretation rather than being replaced by a simple majority vote." }, { "type": "heading", "text": "A bounded comparison is often more useful", "id": "bounded-comparison" }, { "type": "p", "text": "For a comparison of specifications, choose a documented unit, date scope and inclusion rule before interpreting differences. Report both what the selected corpus supports and what it cannot answer. A bounded result about attributed accounts can be strong research without claiming to describe every surviving instrument or its present condition." }, { "type": "note", "title": "Sensitivity as a research habit", "text": "Where an unresolved choice could affect the conclusion, compare reasonable alternative selections or interpretations and retain the results. The difference between them can be more informative than a single unqualified estimate." }, { "type": "heading", "id": "coverage-example", "text": "One coverage statistic, carefully bounded" }, { "type": "p", "text": "For POD 1.6.0, 143,880 of 215,769 canonical organs have stop accounts: approximately 66.7 percent. This describes presence of that category of documentation in the specified release. It does not assess whether each account is complete, whether multiple accounts concern the same state, or how well the corpus represents all historical organs. The 3,604,579 public stop rows use another counting unit and must not be substituted for a count of physical stops." }, { "type": "links", "items": [ { "label": "Ask a question the corpus can answer", "href": "/notebooks/dataset/questions/", "detail": "Denominators, source coverage, nomenclature and workshop networks." } ] } ], "sources": [ { "label": "Pipe Organ Dataset 1.6.0", "href": "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22308263", "detail": "The fixed dataset release, methods and checksums." }, { "label": "Dominik Ukolov · Musikinstrumente im virtuellen Raum (2026)", "detail": "Dissertation submitted to Universität Leipzig, 11 September 2026. Chapters 1–6 and 8; Appendix I.4 for the software and resource inventory. See the dedicated research guides for claim-specific section references. Page numbers refer to the printed manuscript pagination. The manuscript is not distributed by this website." }, { "label": "Pipe Organ Dataset 1.6.0", "href": "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22308263", "detail": "Public versioned corpus and distributions. Counts and coverage in these notebooks refer to this release." }, { "label": "Dominik Ukolov · Musikinstrumente im virtuellen Raum (2026)", "detail": "Dissertation submitted to Universität Leipzig, 11 September 2026. §§4.1–4.3; §8.3.2. Page numbers refer to the printed manuscript pagination. The manuscript is not distributed by this website." } ] }, "figures": {} } }