Trésor des Demoiselles

The Trésor des Demoiselles knowledge base is a FAIR-compliant digital dataset built around Le Trésor des Demoiselles, a 19th-century Belgian female periodical (issued in Brussels) aimed at 'young ladies' whose interests spanned the aesthetic, musical, and domestic spheres.
Beyond poetry, literature, recipes and handicraft instructions, these periodicals regularly included sheet music designed to be cut out and performed at home. Consequently, most surviving bound library volumes are incomplete and missing the scores. This dataset restores those missing links by combining complete physical volumes with individual scores retrieved from various scattered collections.

Built using KBLight and Transkribus for OCR and layout recognition, the knowledge base functions as a modern archive. It goes beyond standard scans by interlinking materials through TEI transcriptions, Wikidata entities, and thematic keywords, offering new entry points into 19th-century domestic musical practices.

From an artistic research perspective, Arabella Pare examines the physical absence and fragmentary nature of the source material, such as the cut-out music sheets and missing instructions in the context of the marginalised and forgotten practices of nineteenth century domesticity. Rather than viewing these gaps as simple loss, her approach treats these fractures as meaningful traces of lived experience. By engaging with what has been cut away and the transdisciplinary relationships with the remaining material, her research seeks to re-enact and understand the interconnected domestic, aesthetic, and performative practices of 19th-century women. 

Developed by Nicholas Cornia, Lidwien Van Winckel, and Arabella Pare at the Orpheus Instituut, the dataset and its methodology were presented at the 'Music at Home' symposium at MDW Vienna (June 2026) and will be the subject of a study day on archiving and marginalised ontologies in autumn 2027.