About Segments and Projects within the Cantus Database

As the Cantus Database has expanded to support datasets generated by scholars through their own research initiatives, we have developed infrastructure to accommodate these new data and to help users filter search results.

Research using the Cantus Database is sometimes focused on individual chants and sometimes more broadly on their sources. Segments and Projects provide two structured ways to distinguish these approaches, supporting clearer data organization for both indexers and users.

Cantus Database Segments highlight and filter into a single view sources of a particular type, provenance, tradition, or other affiliation. Each segment has its own landing page on the database website where the commonality among these manuscripts, fragments, printed books, or other sources of chant can be described, and personnel and funding agencies connected with the production and maintenance of the segment can be recognized. Individual sources may belong to one or more segments; they are defined at the level of the source record within the Cantus Database taxonomy.

Chants of a particular type that have been added to the Cantus Database via distinct research projects can be filtered from the whole dataset through Cantus Database Projects. (Find projects under the “CHANTS” menu item on the website.) These chant records are potentially in many sources in the Cantus Database, and have been tagged at the chant level to be grouped and viewed separately. ‘Projects’ within the Cantus Database allow for additional project-specific data fields at the chant level, where information can be documented that is beyond the scope of a typical Cantus Database chant record. Each project has its own landing page on the database website where its methodology, structure, and history can be described, and personnel and funding agencies connected with the project can be recognized.

Regardless of these ‘segment’ and ‘project’ tags and filters, all chants and sources across the whole of the Cantus Database can be browsed or searched by selecting ‘All Sources’ or ‘All Chants’ from the menus.


Last Update: 1 December 2025 (DL)
Written by Debra Lacoste, Anna de Bakker, Dylan Hillerbrand, and Jennifer Bain (October 2025).