CantusDB

Cantus Database is a database of the Latin chants found in manuscripts and early printed books, primarily from medieval Europe. The main web site, running code on the production branch, can be seen at https://cantusdatabase.org. The staging server, running code on the staging branch, can be found at http://206.12.88.113.

Documentation for the project, including documentation on Cantus Database's APIs, can be found in the Wiki.

OldCantus vs. NewCantus

This repository contains code for "NewCantus," an updated version of Cantus Database built in Django. "OldCantus", built in Drupal, can be accessed at https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca.

Discrepancies between text stored in the CantusDB database and the manuscript text are compiled by testers in the following Google Spreadsheets:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133lVOVM15l7a6bQKIQije4op363ragG4OXewYop_cbQ/edit#gid=0 (Salzinnes)
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zPq-6p8hklKKfTa5A4DXYpwOPOIi41Z7JoAfdGVKzig/edit#gid=0 (Einsiedeln)

Differences in functionality/behavior:

• In OldCantus, there were two different properties for sources/chants etc. to dictate whether their detail pages should be accessible to users or whether they should appear in lists: published and visible. In NewCantus, this system has been simplified - both fields have been combined into a single published field. Published sources, and the chants/sequences contained within them, are visible/accessible to all users. Unpublished sources and their chants/sequences are visible/accessible to all logged-in users, and are inaccessible to logged-out users.

Visible to All Users (Logged-In and Anonymous)

• General:
  • The formatting/style of the entire site is slightly different.
  • In some places, links (to Genre, Office, Feast detail pages, etc.) have been added where there were no links in OldCantus.
  • In some places, title attributes have been added, especially where abbreviations are displayed (visible on mouse-over).
  • Certain pages have an upward-pointing arrow at the bottom that brings the user back to the top of the page. We don't currently plan to implement this.
  • If you click on the items in the header on OldCantus, it usually links you to one of the pages within the dropdown. On NewCantus, you need to open the dropdown and click on an item before you go to any of the pages. We have no plans to implement this on NewCantus, as OldCantus's system is hard to use on mobile devices (for a sad chuckle, check out https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/about, which you get when you click/tap on "About")
• Homepage:
  • When logged out, OldCantus displays a sidebar displaying recently posted articles. NewCantus displays this sidebar, but only displays the articles' titles, rather than the full content of the article (Currently, we don't plan to display the full content of news articles here)
• Article List page:
  • Images from within the news stories are not displayed on the Article List page, whereas they are in OldCantus. (Currently, we don't plan to display images on this page)
  • Articles were manually copied from OldCantus to New, and when I initially did this, I preserved the date but not the time. It's fine that most of the timestamps say "00:00".
• Source List:
  • NewCantus is paginating the sources list page to display 100 sources per page. This is not implemented in OldCantus and is an intentional change.
• Chant Search:
  • New Cantus will do a full text search by keyword by default whereas OldCantus will display options to do either a full text search or a Cantus Index search (if the user clicks on the main Chant Search menu option)
• Provenance detail page - on OldCantus, the Provenance Detail page displays only the provenance's name/title. On NewCantus, this page displays a list of sources that have this provenance.
• Several of the APIs from OldCantus are not implemented in NewCantus, or are implemented differently:
  • json-activity (accessed via https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/json-activity and https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/json-activity?all) is not implemented in NewCantus (Discussion)
  • json-analysis-export (accessed, we think, via https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/json-analysis-export/?src=<source id>) is not implemented in NewCantus (Discussion)
  • some of the keys in the json generated by json-node (accessed via https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/json-node/<id>) are different in NewCantus (Discussion)
  • in the csv API,
    • if the source in question has only sequences and no chants, OldCantus outputs a csv file with only a header and no rows. In this situation, NewCantus outputs a list of all the sequences in the source using the same headers as for chant sources.
    • OldCantus has a cao_concordances column. We were asked not to display chants' CAO concordances anywhere, so this column has been left out. (see issue 125)
• all people are represented as Users in NewCantus. This is in contrast to OldCantus, where there were two separate lists of people: one of Indexers and one of Users. (Discussion)

Logged-In Users

• on the edit-volpiano page, there are some additional links in NewCantus that were previously unclickable text in OldCantus (Discussion)