Change Ringing Corpus · Second analytical output
Ringers write a footnote saying why they rang. Classifying 337,943 of them maps the reasons bells are rung in England, and the physical endurance each occasion asks for. Nothing below identifies anybody: only aggregate counts and lengths leave the database, and no footnote text is published on this page.
The distribution of changes rung — how long the performance was — across occasion types. The dense bands at 1,260 (quarter peal) and 5,040 (full peal) are the two standard lengths, and every category has both, so occasion does not choose length nearly as much as you would expect. Restricted to performances of 100–15,000 changes, plotted to 6,000, and thinned to at most 300 points per category for rendering: read the shape, not the dot count.
Footnotes per month, by category, across 2021–24. The Royal / National line is dominated by four national events rather than by any seasonal cycle — see Rhythm of Ringing, where 24 days carry 21% of all ringing in the window.
Footnotes — not performances — matching each occasion keyword. These do not sum to a total and must not be added up: the categories are independent keyword tests, so 74,594 footnotes (22%) match more than one, and 95,160 (28%) match none.
Built by scripts/build_occasions_page.py from
data/change-ringing.db; the SQL is
queries/occasions/01_footnotes_with_length.sql and the script reads
that file rather than holding a copy, so the recorded query is the one that ran.
The eight categories are regular expressions over footnote text, listed in full
at the top of the builder.
Four limitations, stated rather than buried. One: the unit is footnotes. 337,943 footnotes attach to 227,651 performances, a mean of 1.5 each, so a category count is not a count of ringing occasions. Two: the categories overlap by construction — 74,594 footnotes match two or more, the largest pair being 18,094 in “Birthday + Compliment / Celebration”. Some of that is real (a birthday is a celebration) and some is an artefact: 2,789 footnotes say “thanksgiving for the life of”, which the Memorial pattern and the Church Service pattern both claim, so Church Service is inflated by that much. Three: 28% match no keyword at all, so this is a map of eight reasons and not of every reason. Four: a keyword is not an intent. “First” catches a ringer’s personal milestone and the word “first” in any other sentence alike; no sample has been hand-checked to estimate that error rate, and until one has, treat the ordering of the smaller categories as unproven.
Privacy. Footnotes are written by ringers for ringers, and many
are memorials and funeral tributes composed by people who did not anticipate
republication. Only aggregate counts and change-lengths are embedded in this
page — no footnote text, no names, no dates of individual performances. That is
a deliberate constraint on the analysis, recorded in
docs/ROADMAP.md.
Data derived from BellBoard and Dove’s Guide, CC BY-SA 4.0 — see
data/LICENCE-DATA.md before reusing anything here. The code is MIT.