Jesse P. Karlsberg, PhD, is Senior Digital Scholarship Strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and associated faculty in the Department of Music at Emory University. Jesse is a specialist in digital publishing and an interdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of digital humanities, musicology, and American studies. He consults on digital scholarly expression and pursues research drawing on bibliographic, ethnographic, archival, computational, and music analytical methods to study connections between race, place, religion, and American music focusing on the vernacular sacred songbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  

Jesse is director of Sounding Spirit Collaborative, a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded initiative of ECDS, the University of North Carolina Press, and seven partner archives that promotes research and teaching with southern sacred music. Sounding Spirit’s initiatives include a series of print and digital annotated facsimile editions, a digital library featuring over 1,250 digitized volumes, and a hymnody index. He is product owner of Readux, a platform for annotating and publishing digital editions and thematic collections employed by Sounding Spirit. Jesse is editor of the forthcoming Sacred Tunes and Hymns (1913): A Scholarly Edition, an edition of a genre-spanning shape-note tunebook under contract in the Sounding Spirit series. He is director of Sacred Harp Minutes, a research database drawing on detailed proceedings of singings, consulting editor of the journal Southern Spaces, and a member of the Atlanta Studies journal’s editorial board. Jesse teaches on American music, sacred music, and digital methods in music scholarship in Emory’s Department of Music.