Category: News

Sounding Spirit Collaborative director Jesse P. Karlsberg has received a fourth grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to begin an initiative that promotes engagement with hymnody in southern vernacular sacred music books. This $349,929 grant from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and References Resources program supports the indexing of hymn tunes, texts, and associated authors and composers in the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, a thematic collection of songbooks digitized by the Collaborative and slated for Fall 2024 publication. The planned reference resource, the Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index, will provide a single point of access to and support rich engagement with approximately 300,000 printings of hymn tunes and texts in over 1,250 significant books of vernacular sacred music from the southern United States published between 1850 and 1925. 

The hymnody index will be integrated with the Sounding Spirit Digital Library and complement the Collaborative’s annotated facsimile editions of influential books of sacred southern vernacular music. The scholarly editions series is co-published by the University of North Carolina Press and ECDS and made possible by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant.

Over the next three years, Karlsberg’s multi-institutional team anchored at Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) will:

1. Index a subset of the earliest published songbooks from the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, recording more than 100,000 instances of tunes, texts, and their composers and authors; 
2. Publish the Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index in an open access digital resource that pairs search and display capabilities for tune, text, author, composer, and source information; 
3. Recruit, train, and supervise a cohort of volunteer indexers familiar with vernacular hymnody to produce transcriptions edited and refined by our core project team; and 
4. Develop and apply a robust data model for indexing hymnody that facilitates interoperability with complementary indices and links to the Sounding Spirit Digital Library.

Sounding Spirit’s indexing approach prioritizes interoperability among reference resources. In addition to publishing the Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index, the Collaborative will contribute indexed information to Hymnary.org and Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, the most popular and established reference resources for hymns and musical sources. By collecting and sharing data compatible with these partners, scholars and practitioners will have broad access to all Sounding Spirit indexed hymnody. The index will also seamlessly connect to the high quality digital page images of every hymn and extensive songbook-level metadata collected for the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, showcasing the power of interweaving a reference resource with a humanities collection. 

Indexing hymn tunes and texts in the Sounding Spirit Digital Library will enable research and teaching that integrates the close reading of primary sources, music analysis, and study of humanities research data. Researchers will draw on indexed hymnody to study how the circulation of tunes and texts varied across time and space and responded to racial, denominational, and stylistic boundaries. Teachers will use the index to prompt student engagement with harmonic, textual, and bibliographic differences between versions of a hymn and broader humanities contexts. By comparing and contrasting arrangements of tunes across time and place, exploring versions of hymn texts in different languages, or contrasting different pairings of tunes and texts, students and scholars will explore historic events and topics including the Trail of Tears, the rise of the New South and Jim Crow, and immigration histories.

The audience for the index extends beyond scholars and teachers to include contemporary practitioners. Black, white, and Native American congregations that sing hymns, shape-note singers, participants in gospel convention and fan networks, and choirs and ensembles that perform spirituals will find these tunes and texts foundational to their contemporary practice. For church musicians, choral groups, and sacred music ensembles, the partnership with Hymnary.org will offer ways to discover new settings of texts and tune arrangements. 

Jesse P. Karlsberg, Sounding Spirit project director, editor-in-chief, and ECDS senior digital scholarship strategist will advance this initiative in collaboration with associate editor and music bibliographer Erin Fulton and a new associate editor. Digital text specialist Sara Palmer and software engineer Jay Varner will contribute to Emory’s efforts alongside software developers from Performant Software and technical experts from FromThePage. The core project team will be joined by technical and editorial advisory boards comprising new and returning members.

In the funding announcement, NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) describes the anticipated impact of the awards. “These projects show how the humanities help us understand ourselves and our world and will expand our nation’s cultural resources and foster learning in communities across the country.” Sounding Spirit is proud to count among the 238 education, preservation, research, and public programs selected for funding. At the outset of the funding period, Sounding Spirit will stage a series of physical exhibitions showcasing the digital library on which the index will be built. A spring 2025 convening at Emory University will feature performances, talks, and interactive singing sessions that encourage scholarship and public engagement with the digital library’s works that, thanks to this funding, will soon be indexed.

Ready? Set? Index!

Sounding Spirit is collaborating with seven partner institutions to grow its pilot library to an expansive, open access digital collection comprising over 1,250 volumes of southern vernacular hymnody published between 1850 and 1925. With the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the collaborative is partnering with faculty and graduate students on key editorial components of the library: volume summaries and collection descriptions. Undergraduate students are also contributing to these efforts as part of ongoing pedagogical collaborations.

Volume Summaries (Graduate Students)

We are currently engaging graduate students with strong research and writing skills who can contribute short volume summaries (150–250 words) to the digital library. We are especially eager to work with students whose research interests align with the library’s themes of race, place, religion, and modernity in the history and practice of sacred music. Each summary will relate the digital library’s curatorial themes to an individual work’s form, contents, editors, and audiences. Sample volume summaries in the pilot digital library can be accessed by clicking on any volume and selecting the “More Info” tab.

In addition to publishing with a high-profile digital humanities project, graduate students will receive a $50 stipend for each volume summary. We hope that participating students will contribute between five and ten volume summaries.

Collection Descriptions
(Scholars, Scholar-Practitioner Subject Matter Experts)

We are currently engaging scholars and scholar-practitioners to author one or two collection descriptions that align with their research interests and scholarship. With the list of collections finalized but digital library volumes still being sorted into relevant collections, we are inviting participation by faculty and experts with related expertise and research interests.

These 500–750 word entries about groupings of volumes we are calling “collections” will consider Sounding Spirit’s curatorial emphasis on race, place, religion, and modernity in relation to both the collection theme and included volumes. Collection descriptions will include a short reference list for further engagement that will guide users of the library, including educators at all levels. Sample entries in the pilot digital library can be accessed by clicking on any collection. First drafts of collection entries will be due in Summer 2023, allowing for editorial review and author revisions by early 2024. The descriptions will be published when the digital library goes live in late summer 2024. Our honorarium per collection entry is $150.

Inquiries about contributing volume summaries and collection descriptions can be directed to Sounding Spirit editorial lead, Meredith Doster (mdoster@emory.edu). We look forward to welcoming student-colleagues and scholars to the project!

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!

Sounding Spirit project director Jesse P. Karlsberg has received a third grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to continue the pioneering work of his research lab that promotes collaborative engagement with southern sacred songbooks. This $344,687 grant from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and References Resources (HCRR) program builds on the success of a one-year HCRR-funded planning project co-administered by Karlsberg and managing editor and project manager Meredith Doster that produced a pilot digital library featuring twenty-two books from four partner archives. Karlsberg and Doster will lead a multi-institutional team anchored at Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) in a three-year project expanding the Sounding Spirit digital library to include 1,284 additional books of vernacular sacred music from the US South published between 1850 and 1925. The digital library will complement Sounding Spirit’s annotated facsimile editions of five influential books of sacred southern vernacular music. The scholarly editions series is co-published by the University of North Carolina Press and ECDS and made possible by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant received in 2018.

The four digital library archival partners will be joined by two new contributors, together holding an impressive range of southern sacred song:

• Emory University’s Pitts Theology Library and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library,
• The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, 
• The John Jacob Niles Center for American Music and UK Libraries at the University of Kentucky, 
• The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives and Special Collections, 
• The University of Michigan Library and William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and
• The Department of Special Collections and University Archives and Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum at the University of Tulsa. 

The expanded Sounding Spirit digital library will pair the rich holdings of these new and returning partners with metadata and descriptive entries that place each work in cultural context. The Sounding Spirit project team will collaborate with leading scholars and practitioners to organize all volumes into collections that highlight communities of use, places of origin, genres, and formats. The digital library will be made freely available to the public on a site built using the ECDS-developed, state-of-the-art Readux platform. Building on workflows developed and vetted during the yearlong planning process, contributing archives will digitize selected works at high levels of quality and consistency. Sounding Spirit’s project team will conduct optical character recognition (OCR) and music information retrieval (MIR) on digitized volumes, collecting information about the corpus’ musical and textual contents. Each book will also be accompanied by standard metadata to facilitate interoperability with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), increasing the works’ discoverability. These fields will be supplemented by additional descriptive metadata that incorporate and expand on research conducted to produce the “Checklist of Southern Sacred Music Imprints, 1850–1925.” Compiled by music bibliographer Erin Fulton and project director Karlsberg, this checklist was a major deliverable of the pilot grant and serves as a blueprint for the library’s expansion.

In addition to making this corpus of sacred southern song accessible, the NEH grant will support the research and writing of 425 volume summaries, 100 collection descriptions, and 15 bibliographic essays that will orient readers to the works and their makers, contributing to both the use and understanding of these materials. Editorial lead Meredith Doster will coordinate a research and writing campaign that invites scholars, practitioners, and students to join in the work of framing the library’s materials. These scholarly entries will connect volumes and collections to the library’s foci of race, place, religion, culture, and genre, ensuring that this large-scale digitization project produces an archive intentionally calibrated to questions and considerations of equity across several lines of difference.

The Sounding Spirit digital library will expand the canon of American sacred music by including songbooks from a wide range of underrepresented populations not yet fully acknowledged as important contributors to American history. These music books document little-known publishing practices such as the hymnals and missionizing texts of regional denominations; the words-only hymnals made for displaced Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw populations; the prolific publishing of black Pentecostal Christians such as holiness minister C. P. Jones; and the music publishing of Polish, Czech, Greek, and German immigrant populations. The sacred songbooks included in the digital library refract historical events such as the Civil War, the rise of the New South, and the early waves of the Great Migration through diverse perspectives situated at the margins of the then-emerging industrial book trade. These perspectives include diverse voices and communities spanning an expansive definition of the US South and its diasporas, as well as a wide range of denominational affiliations. Individually and collectively, these works have the potential to change the way researchers, teachers, and members of the public access and understand music’s relationship to American history, culture, and practice.

Jesse P. Karlsberg, Sounding Spirit project director, technical lead, editor-in-chief, and ECDS senior digital scholarship strategist will collaborate with managing editor and project manager Meredith Doster in advancing this initiative. Digital text specialist Sarah Palmer, software engineer Jay Varner, digital asset librarian Ann McShane, and music bibliographer Erin Fulton will contribute to Emory’s efforts, joined on the project staff by digitization supervisor Sarah Dorpinghaus of the University of Kentucky. A new slate of advisory board members will join digitization specialists, archivists, and content experts from each of the six partner archives to round out the project team.

In the funding announcement, NEH acting chairman Adam Wolfson described grant recipients as embodying “excellence, intellectual rigor, and a dedication to the pursuit of knowledge, even as our nation and the humanities community continue to face the challenges of the pandemic.” Sounding Spirit looks forward to collaborating with all partners on the expansion of this digital library in the service of transformative public-facing humanities scholarship in this season of compounding challenge. At the conclusion of the grant period, Sounding Spirit plans to stage a series of physical exhibitions showcasing the library at multiple partner institutions. A planned 2024 symposium at Emory University will feature performances and interactive singing sessions that encourage scholarship and public engagement with the digital library’s works.

Ready? Set? Digitize!

The Sounding Spirit team is delighted to announce the launch of its inaugural digital library. The product of a one year NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant, the pilot digital library features songbooks and hymnals published across the US South from 1850 to 1925. A federated collection spanning holdings from four partner archives, the Sounding Spirit digital library features twenty-two books of vernacular sacred including words-only hymnals, gospel songbooks, spirituals collections, and shape-note tunebooks. Curated into collections that highlight places, genres, denominational affiliations, and notation styles of American sacred music, the digital library allows for rich engagement with songbooks and hymnals seminal in their respective eras, but historically underrepresented in both archival holdings and scholarship.

The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship collaborated on this pilot library with four partner archives whose holdings complement Sounding Spirit’s research focus: Pitts Theology Library at Emory University, the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives and Special Collections, and the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University.

The Sounding Spirit team and partner archives are already at work on the next phase of the digital library, planning to digitize hundreds of volumes identified during this planning grant process. Music bibliographer Erin Fulton collaborated with project director Jesse P. Karlsberg on the “Checklist of Southern Sacred Music Imprints, 1850–1925” that will guide the next phase of the project. As a dataset, the checklist already offers rich opportunities for researching the contours of American sacred songbook publishing. In addition to expanding the library, the team is also planning to incorporate lesson plans and teaching materials for a variety of learning levels, scholarly essays, and data visualizations about the site’s songbooks into the expanded Sounding Spirit digital library site. Until then, the Sounding Spirit team is excited to make these first collections of volumes accessible for research, teaching, and discovery.

Sounding Spirit invites audiences to begin exploring the initial batch of songbooks in the pilot digital library. Scholars, educators, and practitioners of all kinds are welcome! The project team hopes users will take full advantage of the platform’s features to engage the texts and textual communities whose publishing histories and singing practices can reframe our understanding of American sacred music—one text at a time.

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.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced in March 2019 that Sounding Spirit has received an additional grant of $58,230 to support our work making songbooks accessible. This grant from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supplements our fall 2018 grant from the NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations program and will support our planning process for the upcoming year, as well as a pilot launch of a digital library of historical songbooks complementing our digital scholarly editions.

The following four archives with outstanding collections of vernacular sacred music books will partner with us in this grant project:

• Emory University’s Pitts Theology Library,
• The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University,
• The John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, and
• The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives and Special Collections.

This expanded team of public and private institutions with a range of approaches to digitization and digital archiving will first draft and vet processes for digitization and ingest that meet the partners’ various institutional needs. To test these processes, we will launch a pilot site in which each grant partner will contribute five volumes consistent with the focus of the initiative and representative of their collections’ strengths. The planning work will be shared through a publicly accessible white paper and at scholarly meetings in order to support other consortiums of scholars and libraries engaging in related digitization, annotation, and collection work.

Sounding Spirit editor-in-chief Jesse P. Karlsberg will direct the planning process, along with managing editor Meredith Doster and ECDS‘s Allen Tullos and Jay Varner. The team will devise best practices for digitization and Readux publishing with the help of Emory LITS scholarly communications expert Melanie Kowalski and digitization team leader Kyle Fenton, as well as digitization and content consultants from each of the four partner archives.