Focusing on the movement of Latin liturgical chant beyond Europe into Indigenous 和 Settler communities, the 项目 seeks to document sources through the digital platforms 旋律数据库 和 旋律索引.

Dr. Blanton's team of musicologists, students, 和 volunteers is working on 美洲及其他地区的Cantorales, a 项目 dedicated to preserving data about chant books produced in the Spanish diaspora between 1350 和 1800. Blanton indicates that “there are a number of Spanish liturgical manuscripts in North, 中央, 和南美洲, 其中许多从未被编目, 很少有人研究. Our group aims to make these resources known.” Such books are often very large manuscripts that were used by a choir in liturgical performance. 有两个 LaBudde特别收藏 米勒·尼科尔斯图书馆, one donated by Conservatory alumnus James Adair 和 another saved by librarians who literally “passed the hat” to buy it from a Mission, 堪萨斯框架店, where it was being dismantled 和 sold leaf by leaf. “UMKC students have been hard at work investigating both of these manuscripts, providing inventories of the chant in them 和 researching their histories. 的 results of their multidisciplinary work are now preserved in the 旋律数据库,” Blanton said.

In developing learning opportunities for UMKC students, Blanton has collaborated with Bain at Dalhousie, 还有博士. Debra Lacoste at the University of Waterloo, where the CANTUS platforms are maintained. When Blanton suggested that they might ask a group of musicologists to identify similar books for DACT, they asked her to lead the 项目 into future discoveries. “Jennifer 和 Debra were so excited by the work UMKC students are doing—和 by the mentorship I was providing. 的y emphasized that our collaborative model is the ideal scenario for the 项目 I had suggested. Working with students on these books has been so rewarding, so I jumped at the chance.” 的 working group includes academic researchers from Spain, 危地马拉, 澳大利亚, 和北美, who will develop a crowd-sourcing document that will allow librarians 和 archivists, 还有音乐家, 罗马天主教神职人员, 和 nuns to share data about books in their collections. Largely, such books have been shelved since the early nineteenth century 和 forgotten. 的ir work aims to make digital entries for the resources they find so they can become known to the international community for future scholarship. Students will be a key part of that endeavor.

A group of seven UMKC student volunteers worked last year to trace manuscripts across the US, 使用印刷和数字索引. As Blanton notes, “We have only scratched the surface 和 have yielded over one hundred books. 的re are, most certainly, many more that have not been catalogued.“一个, 例如, Blanton found while visiting colleagues at Benedictine College to look at another manuscript. “It was such a lovely surprise but not a surprise,” she says. “无论我走到哪里, I learn about similar books 和 it seems important to document them 和 think about what they reveal about why these books were so important in the Americas. 的re is the dark side of this story—the history of colonization, in which Spaniards forced conversion of native peoples to Roman Catholicism—和 there are fascinating results, such as books that illustrate how indigenous peoples adopted, 改变了, 和 sustained chant in their native languages as well as in Latin. This revelation is at the heart of what we hope to underst和 as this 项目 moves forward.“UMKC将获得45美元,000 of the partnership grant to support student research over a three-year period. 通过研究圣歌的传播, 该小组将帮助发现经济问题, 社会, 文化, 和 intellectual values through the stories of chant manuscripts, 以及与之相伴的人类故事.

的 数字人文实验室，由布兰顿创立， Dr. 杰夫Rydberg-Cox (英语和古典文学)和 Dr. 内森奥勒 (Chemistry) in 2011, will provide imaging support for the Cantorales 项目. 的 Lab’s investigation of the Adair Chant Book is part of a current Digital Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 其中团队, 和同事一起 Yugyung李 (计算机科学)和 李朱 (计算机科学), is using the palimpsests in the book as a testbed for an alternative deep learning model to multispectral imaging.