(Special Section, Hymns Beyond the Congregation II): Spiritual Concert-Fundraisers, Singing Conventions, and Cherokee Language Learning Academies: Vernacular Southern Hymnbooks in Noncongregational Settings

Noncongregational settings were integral to hymnody in the postbellum settler colonial context of the southern United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The incorporation of hymn singing into a wide range of noncongregational settings served Black, white, and Native populations in navigating unsettled racial dynamics during this period across the US South and its diasporas. This essay features three case studies examining hymn collections intended or repurposed for a range of noncongregational uses: spiritual collections connected with the performing ensembles of black institutions, a shape-note songbook that attempted to bridge singing convention and congregational contexts, and a Cherokee-language hymnal being repurposed today for community singing facilitating language learning. Features of these music books’ bibliographic forms, and elements of their music stylistic contents, facilitated their use in communal settings. We argue that taking noncongregational contexts seriously helps to unpack hymns’ connections to race and place, reveal relationships between hymnbooks’ music genre affiliations and formats and their musical-religious functions, and illuminate latent pedagogical and research opportunities. Our case studies expand the temporality associated with noncongregational hymn singing and highlight the value of bibliography as a methodological approach to assessing hymn singing’s diverse contexts

Renewing Multimedia Scholarly Publishing: A Streamlined and Mobile-Friendly Design for Southern Spaces

Jesse P. Karlsberg describes the features of the redesigned Southern Spaces website and places its redevelopment in the context of the need for multimedia publications to adapt to the ever-changing technologies and design conventions of the web

Mapping the "Big Minutes": Visualizing Sacred Harp's Geographic Coalescence and Expansion, 1995–2014

Drawing on the comprehensive records of over four thousand Sacred Harp singings across the globe, Jesse P. Karlsberg and Robert A. W. Dunn trace the geographical transformations of this a capella musical culture from 1995 to 2014. Mapping the proceedings at annual singings in the visualization platform Carto reveals the persistence of robust clusters of Sacred Harp participants within and beyond the southern United States, complicating overdetermined narratives of Sacred Harp's northern expansion and southern decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Three of the eleven interactive maps are embedded within the text; the remaining eight are linked within the text and listed at the end of this blog post

The Center That Holds: Developing and Sustaining Digital Publishing Models at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

Dr. Allen E. Tullos, Emory University (moderator) Panel abstract: The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) supports digital publishing that engages multiple constituencies in and beyond university communities. Southern Spaces, a Drupal-based, open access, peer-reviewed journal; the Atlanta Studies Network, a Wordpress-powered, collaborative site that features scholarship and resources about the city; and Readux, a new platform for reading, annotating, and publishing digital critical editions, demonstrate the Center’s range of publishing models and platforms. Investing in these projects, ECDS redefines sustainability by prioritizing their replicability, utilizing open source tools, and foregrounding graduate student training. ECDS will share strategies for contributing to a sustainable scholarly community through digital publishing. Speaker abstracts: Sarah V. Melton, The Atlanta Studies Network: Building a Community through Digital Publishing The Atlanta Studies Network is an open access, digital publication that features work from scholars, writers, artists, and activists about the Atlanta metro area. A collaborative initiative between institutions throughout the region, the Atlanta Studies Network brings together communities in and beyond the academy through publications, resources, and meetups. The site not only publishes original articles and scholarship, but also showcases other projects and datasets for those wishing to learn more about Atlanta. The publication also sponsors the successful Atlanta Studies Symposium, a conference now in its third year. As a publication and resource, the site fosters partnerships across disciplines, institutions, and organizations. Supported by ECDS, the Atlanta Studies Network runs on Wordpress and makes use of open source geospatial and visualization tools. The initiative thus foregrounds sustainability through its commitment to open software models and multi-institutional collaborations. Emory University, Georgia State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, have each hosted the Atlanta Studies Symposium, allowing these universities to share costs. The Atlanta Studies Network draws on the strengths of its partners to create and highlight scholarship beyond the traditional scholarly article. Jesse P. Karlsberg, Readux: Sustaining the Publication of Digital Critical EditionsReadux is a new platform for publishing digital critical editions that enables unprecedented search and annotation functionality. In Readux, readers browse digitized page images, search TEI-encoded and page region–tagged text, and view multimedia annotations linked to text or page areas. Released as open source software and developed by ECDS and Emory’s library software development team, Readux allows users to browse and read digitized texts in Emory’s digital repository; create annotations incorporating text as well as images, audio, video, and hyperlinks; and export digital editions in web and eBook formats. ECDS views the continued development of open source platforms like Readux as an important component of its commitment to sustainable library-led digital publishing. Readux draws on the unique advantages of its digital format to avoid the difficult choice between facsimile and annotation that print often imposes on critical editions. The resulting digital editions more fully represent the digitized texts and their scholarly interpretation. ECDS is also investing in the production of a series of editions as a proof of concept for the Readux tool featuring an exemplary Emory collection—nineteenth- and twentieth-century American tunebooks and music manuscripts. This work increases the accessibility of the library’s holdings by enhancing them through interpretation and open access digital publication. The series’ development of an editorial board and review process furthers Emory’s capacity for scholarly expression, bringing traditional components of scholarly publishing to an institution without a university press