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

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