Sounding Spirit Overlays and Understories: OCR and Consortial Thematic Research Collections

This presentation focuses on Sounding Spirit, an NEH-funded pilot public digital humanities project curating thematic research collections of digitized American vernacular sacred songbooks. Sounding Spirit uses Readux, a new platform developed by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship that enables browsing, annotation, and publishing with federated collections of digitized books. First, I discuss how Sounding Spirit’s corpus of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century songbooks poses unique challenges that require enhancements to contemporary optical character recognition (OCR). These challenges outline new avenues for research that will enhance textual scholarship with large corpora of digitized works. Second, I propose Sounding Spirit’s model of interinstitutional collaboration as a replicable pathway for enhancing engagement with digitized books.