Continue reading »]]>

I’d like to gauge interest in and to field suggestions on how best to pursue a long-term professional goal: creating a free, electronic archive of early American manuscript sermons. In The New England Soul (1986) Harry Stout challenged “the assumption that printed sermons are the best comprehensive index to ‘what was said and done publicly’” in colonial New England, arguing that manuscript sermons do not reflect the “shift from piety to moralism” suggested by the published record. Stout’s work with manuscript sermons overturned most basic assumptions about theology and lived religion in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but his contributions have never been fully accepted by the scholarly community (I have heard early Americanists refer skeptically to his claims on a number of occasions) at least in part because his work is not easily replicable or verifiable. Stout read manuscript sermons in a dozen different archives over nine years; given the increasingly tight budgets at institutions across the country, most scholars will be lucky if they make a dozen trips to archives over the course of a career. Meredith Neuman’s forthcoming volume, Jeremiah’s Scribes (2013) will be the first major work to treat manuscript sermons since Stout–but still does not solve the larger problem of access. Establishing an electronic archive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript sermons would allow budget-strapped early Americanists to extend the important work begun by Stout and now furthered by Neuman.

I have begun by identifying more than 60 different collections of manuscript sermons written before 1800 housed in eight different archives. While Stout’s work (and, I assume, Neuman’s) primarily treats sermons produced by Congregational ministers in New England, my proposed digital archive would provide a representative sample of sermons from multiple denominations and locations. I have already located sermons produced in New England, South Carolina, Virginia, New York, and New Jersey by Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal preachers. These collections also include sermons written from multiple ideological perspectives, by Loyalists and Patriots, by advocates of Native evangelization and advocates of violence against Native Americans.

During this proposed breakout session, I’d love to hear your thoughts on such a project’s feasibility, appeal, problems, and design. Help, please!

Continue reading »]]>

I’m interested in putting together a website of material on a very early American female lecturer, and I’d like it to be a research site that would host organized scholarly material (her manuscript lectures and letters, her touring schedule, the slides and charts she used, local educational materials, critical essays) but also be set up for feedback from scholars interested in the material—adding their research, links to related sites, critical articles, whatever. I suppose I’m thinking about an open blog attached to a website, but I’ve been surfing some sites that talk about the repetitiveness of certain visitor comments and the problem of too much input. How can this sort of thing be organized? I was curious if people had experience with these sorts of sites (dynamic ones) that didn’t get clogged, so to speak.

G. Ganter

Continue reading »]]>

We are excited to announce that the 2013 meeting of The Society of Early Americanists will feature a half-day THATCamp, an “unconference” that brings together scholars in the humanities with technologists, information scientists, and anyone else interested in learning more about the intersection between humanistic inquiry and digital technology.

THATCamp SEA will be held on Wednesday, February 27, from 1-6pm at the conference hotel. Please see <sea2013.thatcamp.org/register/> to register for the event, which will include workshops on Omeka, an open-source digital publishing platform designed specifically for scholars, librarians, and archivists, as well as on Data Visualization, which will explore several basic tools for visualizing literary and historical data. THATCamp SEA will also feature break-out sessions on topics proposed by THATCampers in the weeks leading up to the event.

Preliminary schedule:

• 1:00-1:30 Welcome
• 1:40-2:30 Workshop on Omeka by Amanda French
• 2:40-3:30 Workshop on Data Visualization by Lauren Klein
• 3:30-3:50 coffee break
• 4:00-4:50 break-out sessions (3)
• 5:00-5:50 break-out sessions (3)