Sounding Spirit Digital Library: Digitizing Southern Vernacular Sacred Song

FAIN: PW-277494-21

Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322-1018)
Jesse P. Karlsberg (Project Director: July 2020 to present)

The digitization of 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the U.S. South published between 1850 and 1925.

The Sounding Spirit digital library provides access to 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the US South published between 1850 and 1925. This corpus of gospel songbooks, collections of spirituals, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals offers critical insights into the lived experience of Americans who used these works to navigate a modernizing turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical landscape. Led by a team of humanities scholars and technologists based at Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship, the Sounding Spirit digital library includes six partner archives holding an impressive range of southern sacred song. Digitizing and making accessible works representing the sacred music making of blacks, whites, and Native Americans, and supporting their interpretation via digital collections and descriptive entries, the Sounding Spirit digital library recasts our understanding of American music for a broad public of researchers, teachers, and practitioners of sacred song.

Associated Products

Supporting Research, Interoperability, and User Experience with the Metadata Application Profile for the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Supporting Research, Interoperability, and User Experience with the Metadata Application Profile for the Sounding Spirit Digital Library
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Abstract: This paper introduces the Metadata Application Profile (MAP) for the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL) and shares the values and considerations that guided its development. An initiative of the Sounding Spirit Collaborative at Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, SSDL is a thematic research collection of 1,300 southern sacred vernacular music books published between 1850 and 1925 that is forthcoming in the fall of 2024. The digital library includes gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, tunebooks, hymnals, and Sunday school songbooks from archives at seven contributing institutions and is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Robust metadata supports 1) browsing and faceted search of the SSDL, 2) interoperability through data sharing partnerships, and 3) quantitative research with the collection. This paper will discuss how the MAP supports these goals. Metadata fields rely on external and local controlled vocabularies whenever possible to facilitate faceting and interoperability. These include vocabularies controlled by the Library of Congress Name Authority File and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and locally controlled vocabularies for domain-specific fields such as music notation. The profile helps expand the project’s reach by including fields that correspond to the requirements of three data sharing partners: the Digital Library of Georgia, the Atla Digital Library, and Répertoire International des Sources Musicales. Finally, the MAP includes fields of interest to researchers such as various categories of places associated with the works; dimensions for width as well as height; and characteristics associated with format, genre, identity, geography, and use.
Date: 10/13/2023
Primary URL: https://semla.wp.musiclibraryassoc.org/meetings/semla2023/program/
Primary URL Description: Conference Website
Conference Name: Southeast Music Library Association

People and Places in Southern Vernacular Sacred Music Publishing, 1850–1925 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: People and Places in Southern Vernacular Sacred Music Publishing, 1850–1925
Author: Erin Fulton
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Abstract: This paper presents the first findings from the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, a new digital collection of 1,250 vernacular sacred songbooks published in the southeastern United States and its diasporas between 1850 and 1925, and shares information about the research potential of this open access resource, which will launch in the fall of 2024. The collection makes available for the first time a representative corpus documenting the range of sacred music publishing in the US South during a critical period in American history, spanning the Civil War, the rise of the New South, and the early waves of the Great Migration. The digital library documents influential sacred singing practices including spirituals, gospel, shape-note singing, and congregational hymnody and represents the music making of Black, white, and Native Americans. Based at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the library draws on the collections of archives at seven institutions with leading holdings of these materials. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sounding Spirit Collaborative has just completed digitizing and collecting metadata for each book. Alongside musical and contextual characteristics of the works, the metadata documents the people and places connected to these sacred music publishing practices. The metadata details books’ authors, editors, contributors, and publishers and records places of contributor affiliation, field research, manufacture, publication, distribution, and use. These digitized books and their associated metadata will facilitate quantitative research into the geography of and contributors to this repertoire at a previously inconceivable scale.
Date: 03/22/2024
Primary URL: https://www.american-music.org/page/DTW2024GeneralInfo
Primary URL Description: Conference Website
Conference Name: Society for American Music

Collaboration and Resource Management in Interinstitutional Digital Thematic Collection Development (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Collaboration and Resource Management in Interinstitutional Digital Thematic Collection Development
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Abstract: For two decades, digital thematic collections have served as a genre of scholarly expression uniquely enabled by affordances of the digital humanities (Fenlon 2017; Price 2009; Palmer 2004). Despite their proliferation, critical examination of digital thematic collections lags behind analysis of other genres similarly transformed through digitality, such as the scholarly edition and the monograph (Elliott 2015; Committee on Scholarly Editions 2015; Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier 2014). In this talk, I identify key challenges impacting digital thematic collection design and development, including resource allocation, project specification design, and collaboration management. As a case study, I discuss the completed pilot phase and in-progress implementation phase of the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, an National Endowment for the Humanities–funded thematic collection of approximately 1,300 digitized books of southern vernacular sacred music published between 1850 and 1925 (Karlsberg et al. n.d.). I describe how the project’s research questions and thematic scope motivated an interinstitutional collaborative approach and detail how our intentional embrace of collaboration shaped technical and project managerial aspects of the initiative, including identifying collaborators, formulating digitization specs, and budgeting and allocating resources.
Date: 08/07/2024
Primary URL: https://dh2024.adho.org/
Primary URL Description: Conference Website
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13834936
Secondary URL Description: Book of Abstracts
Conference Name: Digital Humanities

Research and Teaching with the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Research and Teaching with the Sounding Spirit Digital Library
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Author: Erin Fulton
Author: Billy Smith
Author: Kimberly Hieb
Abstract: This panel discussion celebrates the 2024 launch of the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, details opportunities for teaching and research with the resource, and shares takeaways from its development. The library includes 1,300 newly digitized music books from the US South and its diasporas containing over 250,000 pages of hymnody. Its gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, tunebooks, hymnals, and Sunday school books represent music making of Black, white, and Native southerners published between 1850 and 1925 and drawn from archives at seven institutions. The panel features project staff, archival partners, and researchers and teachers making use of the project’s materials.
Date: 03/22/2025
Primary URL: https://www.american-music.org/page/TAC2025GeneralInfo
Primary URL Description: Conference Website
Conference Name: Society for American Music

Singing the Sacred: Songbooks and Hymnals from the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (1850–1925) (Exhibition)
Title: Singing the Sacred: Songbooks and Hymnals from the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (1850–1925)
Curator: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Curator: Erin Fulton
Curator: Meredith A. Doster
Abstract: Singing the Sacred showcases southern vernacular songbooks published between 1850 and 1925, representing the music making of diverse religious groups. Across this dynamic period, modernizing publishing practices coincided with other far-reaching transformations. New book formats and sacred music genres flourished alongside devotional practices attuned to a changed and changing world. This exhibition celebrates the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (library.soundingspirit.org), a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded resource for research and teaching with more than 1,250 books of southern vernacular sacred music. Singing the Sacred features works from Emory University, Middle Tennessee State University, University of Kentucky, University of Michigan, and University of Tulsa. Book features ranging from covers and bindings to music notation and marginalia introduce the exhibition. Visitors will first encounter the physical form of spiritual collections, Sunday school and gospel songbooks, hymnals, and shape-note tunebooks. The second half of the exhibition explores the relationship of these volumes to contexts, communities, and geographies of diverse peoples and movements in the New South.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://pitts.tl/singingthesacred
Primary URL Description: Exhibition page on Pitts Theology Library digital collections website.

Sounding Spirit Singing School (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Sounding Spirit Singing School
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Author: Meredith A. Doster
Author: Erin Fulton
Abstract: The Sounding Spirit Singing School will be held on April 4 and 5, 2025, at the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University. A celebration of the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, the Singing School will feature volumes from this groundbreaking collection of over 1,250 volumes of southern sacred vernacular song published between 1850 and 1925. The convening takes inspiration from its namesake, the singing school. Since the eighteenth century, singing schools have served communities and congregations exploring music pedagogy and practice independent of mainstream educational contexts. Often taught by a visiting instructor, singing schools teach people how to sing together while also serving as important social events for wide-ranging communities. The Sounding Spirit Singing School embraces these historical legacies and invites singers, scholars, and practitioners to learn and sing sacred music together.
Date Range: 04/04/2025–04/05/2025
Location: Emory University
Primary URL: https://soundingspirit.org/singing-school/
Primary URL Description: Conference Website

Sounding Spirit Digital Library: Southern Sacred Vernacular Music Books (1850–1925) (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Sounding Spirit Digital Library: Southern Sacred Vernacular Music Books (1850–1925)
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Author: Meredith Doster
Author: Erin Fulton
Author: Sara Palmer
Author: Sarah Dorpinghaus
Author: Ann McShane
Author: Jay Varner
Author: Yang Li
Author: Ben Silverman
Author: James Bias
Author: Em Nordling
Author: Lucy Wallitsch
Author: Rachel Shapiro
Author: Chase Castle
Author: Chisomo Mwale
Author: Patrick Pender
Author: Brenda Umutoniwase
Author: Diana Duarte Salinas
Author: Anne Evers
Author: Carol Ditner-Wilson
Author: Solomon Kim
Author: Zoe Stephens
Author: Henry Gao
Abstract: The Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL) showcases over 1,250 volumes of southern sacred vernacular song published between 1850 and 1925 that represent diverse musical genres, religious groups, and singing traditions. The library’s single access point brings together a canon of music from seven partner institutions that cuts across regional, religious, racial, and cultural lines. Sounding Spirit’s scope and curation allow researchers, scholars, teachers, worship leaders, and singers to reconsider histories and perceptions of sacred music’s many siloes. A project of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the SSDL invites users to engage volumes and songs both familiar to scholars and practitioners of sacred music, as well as those not yet accounted for in histories of America’s past, present, and future.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://library.soundingspirit.org/
Primary URL Description: Digital Archive Website
Access Model: open access

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