Change Ringing Corpus · 2012–2024 · Four sources, one schema
Change ringing has kept meticulous records for three centuries, in four separate collections that have never been joined. This corpus joins them, checks every year against an independent count, and publishes what the joined data will and will not support.
One plain course of Cambridge Surprise Minor — 120 changes in 5 leads, the path of every one of the 6 bells. Gold is the second’s line, green the treble’s plain hunt. Drawn from the place notation -36-14-12-36-14-56,12 published by the CCCBR Methods Library, and checked against the library’s own lead head (156342) before this page was written.
Performances and their bands from BellBoard; towers, bells and founders from Dove’s Guide; methods and their place notation from the CCCBR Methods Library; compositions from CompLib. The four are normalised into one relational schema, so a question can cross between them — which methods are rung on bells cast by which foundry, in which counties, on which nights of the week.
Every year of the performance record is checked against BellBoard’s own independent count before it is published, and the linkage rates, the classifier accuracy and the parts that could not be matched are all stated rather than rounded away. Several of the findings below overturn what ringers generally believe; two of them are negative results, published because a checked negative is worth more than an unchecked positive.
Each one asks a question the joined corpus can answer, and says how far the answer can be trusted.
51,523 attributed bells mapped by the foundry that cast them
How methods extend from one stage to the next
20,679 methods drawn as the path a bell traces
Heuristic search engine for novel compositions
What 86,054 compositions ask of a band and conductor
The week, the year, and 24 days that carry a fifth of 2021–24
Who rings with whom, across 70,351 names
Why bells are rung, from 337,946 footnotes
Dove says the tower rings on Tuesday. Does it?
The split every ringer describes, which the data does not contain
Ringers rotate through the bells, but they do not work up them
Towers, methods and ringers in one 3-D field
Method symmetries arranged on a phyllotaxis sphere