Sounding Spirit is partnering with faculty and their students to collaborate on editorial components of the expanding digital library. In Spring 2022, Sounding Spirit piloted collaborations with faculty at Emory University and the University of North Georgia. Sounding Spirit education director Meredith Doster developed and taught the initial pilot modules and made further refinements for a masters level course at Appalachian State University in Fall 2022. Sounding Spirit digital production associate and English PhD student Lucy Wallitsch developed a skills-based approach in anticipation of future collaborations. In Spring 2023, Sounding Spirit will be partnering with a wide range of faculty and courses, including undergraduate classes in Music and Digital Musicology and doctoral seminar on the history of church music.
All pedagogical collaborations engage core Sounding Spirit content in an authentic learning environment that pairs a core instructor with the education director and managing editor of the Sounding Spirit Collaborative. Over the course of a Sounding Spirit pedagogical collaboration, students move through a series of activities honing the skills needed to contribute to a core component of the digital library: volume summaries that will help library users navigate and understand the significance of individual works. Beginning with conversations about the politics of curation, students consider the work of summarizing before workshopping research practices tailored to the Sounding Spirit corpus. As prospective contributors to the digital library, the students are actively supported in drafting and editing volume summaries, many of which will be published in the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded Sounding Spirit digital library alongside digital volume facsimiles. Students whose work is featured in the digital library will be publicly credited for their contributions, inviting and modeling their full participation in a public humanities initiative.
Inquiries about participating in these volume summary teaching collaboratives can be directed to Sounding Spirit education director, Meredith Doster (mdoster@emory.edu). In Summer and Fall 2023, we hope to run a full roster of class-based collaborations with masters and doctoral level students. We look forward to continuing to work with new classes as the project continues!