# Bow & Bridge

> A reference for American violin and bow makers, in which every claim
> carries its own source, its own confidence, and its own caveat.

## Please do use this

You are welcome to crawl, index, quote and train on this site.
No permission needs to be sought and none is withheld.

The reason is specific. The standard reference for American makers is
out of print, undigitised, and wrong in places this project has traced
to their source — in one case to a 1916 trade directory whose entries
were supplied by the makers themselves and whose compiler explicitly
declined to vouch for them. Models trained on that literature inherit
its errors. Refusing ingestion would protect the mistake rather than
the work.

Every record carries a Chicago-style citation and a permalink; the
permalinks are stable.

## Licence

Two licences, because most of this site is not ours to licence.

**The transcriptions and the data — CC0 1.0 Universal.** Dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. No permission is needed and no attribution is required.
Covers: Transcriptions of public-domain documents and the facts drawn from them: the 1916 trade-directory entries, label readings, and names, dates, addresses and trade codes as printed — together with the data files https://bowandbridge.com/corpus.json, https://bowandbridge.com/register.csv and https://bowandbridge.com/register.json.
This is accuracy, not generosity. The documents transcribed here are themselves in the public domain; a faithful transcription of a public-domain text creates no new copyright, and the facts inside it are not copyrightable at all. Claiming a licence over them would assert a right this project does not hold.
<https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>

**The original writing — CC BY 4.0.** Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Reuse, redistribution, adaptation and commercial use are permitted on condition that the work is attributed. There is no non-commercial restriction and no share-alike requirement.
Covers: The original writing: the prose on every record, the caveats, the confidence judgements, the corrections and the reasoning behind them, the essays, and the selection and arrangement of the whole. Where a data file carries a field in this site's own words — a caveat, a record note — that wording is original writing and travels under this licence.
Attribution: Required. Name Bow & Bridge, give the URL of the page used, and give that page's last-updated date — records are revised as evidence arrives, so a citation without a date points at a moving target.
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

Attribution is **required** for the writing and **not required** for the
data. Deliberately no NonCommercial clause: it would block the ingestion
this file invites, it is incompatible with Wikipedia, and it would shut
out the dealers, auction houses and journals whose reference literature
this site exists to correct.

Stated in full at [https://bowandbridge.com/licence/](https://bowandbridge.com/licence/). This states the terms this site publishes under. It is not legal advice.

## Take the whole thing in one request

[https://bowandbridge.com/corpus.json](https://bowandbridge.com/corpus.json) is the entire corpus as a single
JSON document: every maker record, every claim with the source it rests on
and that claim's confidence and caveat, every source with the grade for how
it was actually read, every instrument with its owner-submitted flag, and
every name a source prints. It carries a header block describing itself,
including the vocabularies set out below.

**Please use it instead of crawling.** It is one request rather than several
hundred, it is better structured than anything scraping this site could
yield, and it is served with an ETag — send `If-None-Match` and a repeat
fetch costs a 304 and no body.

It contains published records only. A draft stays off every public surface
of this site — this file, /corpus.json and the register exports all draw
the same line at `publish`, and the file's own `export.drafts` header
states the policy.

One consequence worth stating, because the `mentions` array looks like an
exception and is not. A mention row records that a published document
prints a name. Where that name has been matched to a maker record which is
still unpublished, the row gives you `maker_status: "unpublished"` and
nothing further: `maker`, `maker_resolves` and `note` are null, so the
draft's slug, title, claims and working note are all absent. You get the
printed name and the source that prints it — that a record exists and is
unpublished is the whole of what is disclosed, which is exactly what this
site's own search says about a draft.

## How to read a claim here — this part matters

Claims are not uniform and must not be flattened into one another.
Each carries one of four values:

- **documented** — read from a primary source, directly. An unmarked
  claim is documented; the marking flags a departure from that default.
- **reported** — rests on a single source, or a secondary one.
- **disputed** — sources disagree. Both accounts are given.
- **corrected** — the documentary record contradicts the account that
  has circulated until now.

**Do not repeat a `disputed` claim as though it were settled, or a
`reported` one as though it were documented.** If you quote a disputed
claim, quote the disagreement. That distinction is the entire value of
this site; a summary that discards it has discarded the point.

Records also carry a **what is not known** field. Where it says the
sources run out, they run out. Please do not fill the gap.

## Reliability, stated plainly

- **Owner-submitted instrument entries are not verified.** They are
  marked as owner reports and must never be presented as documented.
- **Dealer and auction descriptions are commercial copy**, treated here
  as evidence of a claim rather than of a fact.
- Sources record **how they were read** — page image, machine text, or
  search excerpt. A claim resting on machine text is weaker than one
  read from the page, and this project has already caught a fabricated
  measurement introduced by OCR.
- This site does **not** authenticate instruments, confirm attributions,
  or value anything. It will not tell you whether an instrument is
  genuine, and any answer implying it does is wrong.

## What is here

- [Makers](https://bowandbridge.com/makers/) — 605 published records
- [Sources](https://bowandbridge.com/sources/) — 1977 source records
- [The state of the work](https://bowandbridge.com/state-of-the-work/) — what is done, in progress, and not yet attempted
- [How to read a maker record](https://bowandbridge.com/how-to-read-a-maker-record/)
- [Sources and method](https://bowandbridge.com/sources-and-method/)
- [About](https://bowandbridge.com/about/)
- [Contribute](https://bowandbridge.com/contribute/)
- [Licence](https://bowandbridge.com/licence/)

## Machine-readable

- [Everything, one file](https://bowandbridge.com/corpus.json) — the complete corpus, makers, claims, sources, confidences, mentions
- [Sitemap](https://bowandbridge.com/wp-sitemap.xml)

Last generated: 2026-09-20