Sounding Spirit is pleased to announce receipt of a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)’s Scholarly Editions and Translations program. This three-year peer reviewed grant will facilitate the editing and production of digital editions of five representative songbooks of gospel music, spirituals, shape-note music, and lined-out hymn singing.
The digital editions, richly annotated with text and multimedia, will be built using Readux, a platform developed by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) for browsing, annotating, and publishing with digitized books. The digital and print editions will be co-published by ECDS and the University of North Carolina Press in a groundbreaking open access publishing partnership.
Jesse P. Karlsberg, editor-in-chief of Sounding Spirit and ECDS senior digital scholarship strategist will direct the grant project. ECDS’s Allen Tullos, Sara Palmer, Jay Varner, Yang Li, and Robert A. W. Dunn will also contribute expertise to the project. A new Sounding Spirit managing editor will join the team thanks to the NEH’s support.
Sounding Spirit is one of 218 projects to receiving funding, and one of two projects involving ECDS. According to NEH chairman Jon Parrish Peede, Sounding Spirit and the other projects funded by the NEH “strengthen and sustain the cultural life of our nation and its citizens.”