In this paper, we present a method for conducting comparative corpus studies in musicology that reduces the time-consuming digitization process. Instead of encoding whole corpora of musical sources, we suggest sampling bars from these sources. We address the challenge of selecting representative samples and evaluate three different sampling methods. We used Beethoven's Bagatelles Op. 33 as a case study to find the method that works best in finding samples representative with respect to differences. We believe that this approach offers significant value to musicological research by enabling large-scale analyses and thereby statistically sound results. Moreover, we believe our work to be a valuable step toward understanding nineteenth-century editorial practices and enriching the field of scholarly editing of historical musical works.