In 2023, the Sounding Spirit Collaborative completed the digitization of over 1,000 sacred vernacular songbooks that will be included in its expanded digital library, scheduled to launch in late 2024. With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sounding Spirit worked with partners at seven institutions with leading collections of gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals. Sounding Spirit also continued work on its scholarly editions series showcasing annotated facsimiles of influential books of sacred southern vernacular music co-published by the University of North Carolina Press and ECDS, and began planning for a new initiative indexing the tunes, texts, people, and sources connected with southern hymnody.
TAKE NOTE at Emory University is a series of short documentary films made in partnership with the Academic Production Team. The series of films focuses on faculty research and scholarship at Emory University. Each segment highlights the relationship between Emory scholars, the work they produce, and the communities they impact. Dr. Bailey Betik, ECDS Digital Publishing Specialist, designed and created their website.
In order to best support faculty in creating public-facing displays of scholarship, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship is excited to announce the second completed wave of our Kickstart Your Website Initiative.
In April, ECDS solicited applications for the Kickstart Initiative to create free faculty website builds for simple, professional academic websites. This opportunity was ideal for faculty and staff members with upcoming publications, research interventions, or pedagogical findings who wanted to strengthen their digital footprint and online presence.
In addition, the Initiative created training opportunities in web design for graduate students’ professional development. Supervised by ECDS Digital Publication Specialist Dr. Bailey Betik, graduate student trainees Noah Gounoue, Jessica Locklear, Surbhi Shrivastava, Wenxin Liu, and Anqi Hu assisted in the design, build, revision, and content migration for these builds.
The completed sites were:
Created by Dr. Crystal Sanders of Emory University and Dr. Marla Frederick of Harvard University, the HBCU Film Festival is a short film festival providing the opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to exhibit their emerging work on the history and ongoing contributions of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges & Universities). Both scholars collaborated with Digital Publishing Specialist Dr. Bailey Betik and Video Specialist Dr. Steve Bransford to create the website for the festival and coordinate logistics for film submission.
Thriving Future Cropscapes is a four-year NSF-funded project bringing together stakeholders from many sectors, regions, and disciplines to anticipate and prepare for the major changes likely to shape agricultural cropping systems in the southern and central US over the next 30-40 years. Faculty partner Dr. Emily Burchfield partnered with Dr. Bailey Betik to design and create the website for the project.
Tango in the Humanities: Examining a Multidimensional Art Form Across Disciplinary and Geographic Boundaries Conference was a global tango conference centered on broadening the scholarly discourse on tango, its history, its influence on culture and society, and its application for practitioners. Hosted by Emory University, it featured twenty-three scholars and practitioners from around the world and of a variety of humanistic disciplines, including race and gender studies, political history, musicology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, dance history, and performance. Dr. Kristen Wendland of Emory University and independent scholar Kacey Link worked with Dr. Bailey Betik to create a website and discussion forum for scholars across the world.
Many of the collaborators were contributing authors to The Cambridge Companion to Tango, another site designed by Dr. Betik.
The Imagining Democracy Lab is a multidisciplinary effort to link imagination, knowledge, and action to advance civic and political engagement. Led by Prof. Carol Anderson (African American Studies) and Prof. Bernard Fraga (Political Science), the lab is a research ecosystem that combines academic and public scholarship with social justice activism, fostering direct connections to community organizations and to the public. A major goal of the research lab is to connect academic and real-world understandings of barriers to democratic enfranchisement and responsiveness, and gain access to information that helps participants take action, from local to national levels.
Drs. Anderson and Fraga coordinated with Dr. Bailey Betik to design and build the website, as well as with Dr. Steve Bransford for best practices on filming and audio recording of “Freedom Dreams.” Ian Burr, 3D Modeling Specialist, created the logo for the Imagining Democracy Lab team.
The Georgia Asian American Community Archives Initiative aims to identify, collect, preserve, and promote materials related to the history and experience of Asian Americans in Georgia. GAACAI’s goal is to build connections between the Asian American community and Georgia libraries, archives, and museums community-centered events, artistic and storytelling initiatives, and research and educational endeavors.
Librarian Dr. Gautham Reddy partnered with Dr. Bailey Betik to design and create the website for GAACAI.
