Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
DACT
The Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) is a Partnership Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 895-2023-1002). It aims to extend the study of the dissemination of plainchant from localized research focused mostly on Europe and the Middle Ages to global research tracing transmission to other continents through to the modern era. Understanding how chant traveled and adapted over time and place through oral and written traditions is important for what it can tell us about the communication of culture through the encounters of people and ideas. Yet, data management when dealing with a thousand years of music is a major obstacle. To address this problem, DACT is mobilizing a large network of people and projects to analyse chant repertories digitally and to develop new computational resources in tandem with existing chant databases and digital repositories of manuscripts.
UFAL is the host institution for the Chant Analytics team, which is led by Jan Hajič jr. The team is developing computational tools for the study of chant transmission, both of melody and repertoire, and doing research using these tools, especially to evaluate their effectiveness and accuracy. The team members are:
Prof. Mark Daley
And the student team members at UFAL are Mgr. Vojtěch Lanz and Anna Dvořáková.
The DACT project has the following partners:
- Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada [Host Institution]
- ACENET, Supercomputing in Atlantic Canada
- Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, UK
- Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA
- Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology
- McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, Schulich School of Music
- Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada
- Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland, Institute of Art
- RISM Digital Center, Bern, Switzerland
- Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Musicology, Bratislava, Slovakia
- Unama'ki College, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, Musica Hispanica / Spanish Early Music Manuscripts
- Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Lisbon, Portugal, Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical, (Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music CESEM)
- Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, e-codices, Fragmentarium
- University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, CODICES: Digital Humanities Lab
- University of Oslo, Norway, BENEDICAMUS project
- University of Oxford, UK, DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)
- University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant
- Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada