Principal investigator (ÚFAL): 
Project Manager (ÚFAL): 
Grant id: 
895-2023-1002
ÚFAL budget: 
779000
Duration: 
2023-2029

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:

Kate Helsen

Tim Eipert

Prof. Mark Daley

And the student team members at UFAL are Mgr. Vojtěch Lanz and Anna Dvořáková.