Tag: emory center for digital scholarship

Digital Research Role at Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

This September I will be transitioning into an exciting new role at Emory University that mixes my interests in collaborative digital research projects, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American music, teaching, and interdisciplinary editing and publishing about the southern United States. After a year as postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities publishing, I will be joining the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship full time as senior digital scholarship strategist.

In this new role, my responsibilities will include overseeing the center’s process for producing digital projects, from the proposal stage, through implementation, to sustainability. I will also manage key center initiatives related to my own research on American music and the US South. These projects include the Sounding Spirit initiative to publish digital critical editions and companion print editions of key texts from the Southern sacred music diaspora, 1850–1925, the Atlanta Studies scholarly journal and blog on the metropolitan Atlanta region, the Readux platform for browsing, annotating, and publishing editions of digitized books, and the Sacred Harp Minutes research database. I will continue to teach one course a year in Emory’s American studies, interdisciplinary studies, and music departments. Finally, I’ll consult with Emory faculty on digital projects related to Readux and the southern United States. I’m excited to move into this new role.

“Folklore’s Filter” and a Post-doctoral Fellowship

In August 2015 I graduated from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts with a PhD after my dissertation, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing,” was accepted by the graduate school. On September 1 I began an exciting new position as Post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities Publishing at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

My dissertation examines the impact of folklorization on Sacred Harp’s associations with race and place. I trace this through the tunebook’s twentieth-century editions and interactions between singers, folklorists, and folk festival audiences. Emory’s electronic theses and dissertations repository features the dissertation’s abstract and table of contents.

In my post-doctoral fellowship I will edit a digital critical edition of Joseph Stephen James’s 1911 Original Sacred Harp, a companion to the Centennial Edition I edited published by Pitts Theology Library and the Sacred Harp Publishing Company this February. The digital edition will use Readux, a tool for annotating and publishing digital critical editions developed by a team from Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the library’s software development team with which I’ve served as annotation and export consultant. My digital critical edition will be the first volume in a series I’m editing using the platform tentatively titled Race and Religion in Turn of the Twentieth-century American Music. In addition to this project, I will teach a class each spring and will continue to pursue my writing and research. I’m happy to have completed my doctoral program and am thrilled to begin this new stage of my career.

Announcing Southern Spaces’s New Mobile-friendly Design

Home page of the redesigned Southern Spaces site. Screen capture courtesy of Southern Spaces.
Home page of the redesigned Southern Spaces site. Screen capture courtesy of Southern Spaces.

In August Southern Spaces, the open access peer-reviewed journal for which I serve as managing editor, launched a new redesigned site. As I described in a blog post announcing the launch the “new design emphasizes visual clarity, readability, richer multimedia, and a mobile-friendly responsive layout [and] introduces a dynamic, open source journal publishing platform” the journal will make available as a Drupal 7 distribution this fall. (( Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Renewing Multimedia Scholarly Publishing: A Streamlined and Mobile-Friendly Design for Southern Spaces,” Southern Spaces Blog, August 19, 2015, https://southernspaces.org/2015/renewing-multimedia-scholarly-publishing-streamlined-and-mobile-friendly-design-southern-spaces. ))

The launch of the new site also marks the end of my tenure on the journal’s graduate student staff after two years as managing editor and two additional years in other positions. As I look forward to a new position at Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship this fall I am also transitioning into a newly created role as the journal’s consulting editor. As consulting editor I will work with the journal’s senior editor, editorial board, and new managing editor Meredith Doster, contributing to discussions on strategy and consulting on the development and distribution of our publishing platform.