Bettina,
At Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:19:44 +0200, Bettina Wagner wrote:
Could anybody please explain what the relation between the CURSUS database and the CANTUS-Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant (http://publish.uwo.ca/~cantus/) is? If there is one, but they seem to cover the same sort of material. But I have to admit that I have never used CURSUS.
As far as I am aware, there is no relation between them. I'm not sure of the etymology of CURSUS. James might know? But the similar sounding names are a red herring.
CURSUS is a corpus of transcriptions of liturgical books. It provides quite a fine level of granularity as well as detailed semantic tagging. From what I understand, CANTUS is a database of chant incipits which, again, provides rich semantics. Probably the key difference is that of transcription vs. database. For example, CANTUS' incipits consist of up to 29 characters of what appeared in the witness, whereas CURSUS transcribes the whole manuscript and automatically generates incipit views.
Another way of conceptualising the relationship is that, in theory, CANTUS could be derived from CURSUS, but CANTUS could not be used to re-construct CURSUS.
Hope that helps.
Best, Richard
PS. I'm now getting an idea of what hosting provisions will be available at UEA in the future.