Mapping the "Big Minutes": Visualizing Sacred Harp's Geographic Coalescence and Expansion, 1995–2014

• Main Authors: Jesse P. Karlsberg, Robert A. W. Dunn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2018-01-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: Music; Digital Humanities; Regional Studies; GIS/Mapping; Religion and Spirituality
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/43256

Drawing on the comprehensive records of over four thousand Sacred Harp singings across the globe, Jesse P. Karlsberg and Robert A. W. Dunn trace the geographical transformations of this a capella musical culture from 1995 to 2014. Mapping the proceedings at annual singings in the visualization platform Carto reveals the persistence of robust clusters of Sacred Harp participants within and beyond the southern United States, complicating overdetermined narratives of Sacred Harp's northern expansion and southern decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Three of the eleven interactive maps are embedded within the text; the remaining eight are linked within the text and listed at the end of this blog post.