Doug Boyd / Lexington, Kentucky / 2014-2015 Fellow / Topic: Oral History
Project: Doug Boyd’s Fellowship supported work involves enhancing online access to the lengthy folklore recordings in Berea’s Leonard Roberts Collection. Such recordings are not easily searchable without a transcript. Even with a transcript, the textual representation often does not correlate to what is heard on the recording. Doug will be exploring the adaptability to these folklore recordings of the web-based Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). OHMS allows indexing audio directly without transcription. Doug’s work will result in 18 recordings from the Roberts folklore collection being indexed and made searchable online. He will also work with Special Collections staff to develop staffing patterns and work flows, toward the end of using OHMS more extensively to make Berea’s spoken word recordings easily accessible and searchable. Doug received his Ph.D. degree in Folklore from Indiana University. He is the Director of the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky and regularly writes, lectures, and consults on oral history and digital technologies, archives, and digital preservation.
Jesse P. Karlsberg
Jesse P. Karlsberg / Atlanta, Georgia / 2013-2014 / Topic: Oral History
Project: Jesse's research will involve both study in the Berea Archives and travel conducting oral history interviews. At Berea he will be focusing on audio recordings in the William H. Tallmadge and Rural Hymnody Symposium collections. Oral history interviews will be with members of long-time Sacred Harp singing families in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. He will use their collections of songbooks as a starting point for wide ranging discussions of their own and relatives' involvement with Sacred Harp and related singing styles.
Jesse's research will result in a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and photographs to be made accessible for future research use in the Berea College Archives.
Jesse is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Emory University and serves as Managing Editor of Southern Spaces, published online by Emory University Libraries. He is also the vice president of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, publisher of the most widely used contemporary edition of The Sacred Harp, and edits the online Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter.
