Cantus Planus Computing Colloquium

Digital chant analysis is developing fast across the Cantus Planus community. Several projects (both collaborative and individual) are building databases and writing software of various kinds. In this joint Cantus Planus and Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission online workshop, we will bring together as many of the relevant people and research teams as possible to explore possibilities for interoperability, shared platforms, and minimisation of duplicated effort.

Call for Papers

We welcome contributions related to software development for chant research. In contrast to the Cantus Planus Research Forum, the focus of this colloquium is on the technical content, and on connecting the programmers involved in chant research. We thus welcome contributions from existing software teams as well as from newly established groups, and projects that are just starting. 

Possible topics include:

• Data: new databases and changes in existing databases, datasets, use of external resources (e.g. liturgical databases)

• Standards: metadata, data harmonisation efforts, controlled vocabularies, tutorials, manuals

• Analytical tools: approximate search, pattern identification, network models

• Optical music recognition: systems, datasets, evaluation, case studies

• Visualisation: notations, maps, online interfaces

• “Invisible work”: interoperability and “glue” code, preprocessing pipelines, scraping, etc.

Any and all programming to support chant research is welcome, as well as contributions that describe the technical needs and envisioned tech stacks of projects that are in their early stages.

Submission format: Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words, outlining what digital tools you/your team will present, by 30 August 2025. Whenever applicable, please provide links to the tools and source code (e.g., github).

We will notify you whether your proposal was successful by 10 September 2025.

Presentation format: There will be no spoken presentations. Instead, each team or individual will submit a short written technical report by 30 September 2025 (up to 3000 words per team; this can be informally written, and shorter reports are very welcome), and these will be shared with all attendees ahead of time.

The technical report should briefly introduce the musicological/liturgical questions; the bulk of it, however, should discuss the technical aspects of the project (e.g. which programming language, which sorts of algorithms to answer what kinds of questions, how the database is structured, etc.). During the online event, each team will be allocated 25 minutes for an open Q+A. 

At the end of the workshop, there will be an opportunity to discuss overlap and start arranging collaborations.

Follow-up: If the workshop is successful, we intend to coordinate a highly collaborative survey paper of chant computing for a relevant journal, with (primarily) the tech report authors as co-authors.

Important dates

August 30th: Abstract submission

September 10th: Notification of acceptance

September 30th: Technical report submission

October 17th: Registration deadline

October 24th: Online workshop

Chairs

In case the website doesn't make something sufficiently clear, feel free to ask Jan Hajič for clarifications at hajicj@ufal.mff.cuni.cz.