The Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) is a partnership project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 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.
You can help! Do you own a chant fragment or do you know someone who does? What do you know about its history and travels? Fill out our survey to be part of our research study on the transmission of medieval chant documents.
DACT has been awarded a 7-year SSHRC Partnership grant (2023-2030, SSHRC: 895-2023-1002). Previous funding included a 3-year SSHRC Partnership Development grant in the 2018 competition (2019-2022+, SSHRC: 890-2018-0024) and the Stage 1 Partnership grant (2022, SSHRC: 895-2022-0011); work on this project is ongoing. This website provides a brief overview of the project and its participants. For more information, please contact Jennifer Bain (jennifer.bain@dal.ca) or Debra Lacoste (debra.lacoste@dal.ca).
