Sound and Community: "Singing Box 331" as Digital History

I want to start with a confession. I always thought the William and Mary Quarterly was a bit stuffy. After all, it bills itself as "one of the oldest academic journals in the United States," is published by "one of the oldest scholarly societies in the U.S. committed to the study of early America," and is housed at the second-oldest college in the United States.¹ This is not the sort of publication I would associate with innovation. Yet over the past two years the WMQ has shown a remarkable willingness to engage with the new forms of scholarship afforded by the digital age. In 2018, it convened two landmark workshops, "Archives-Based Digital Projects in Early America" and "Digital Research in Early America," while also publishing its first major digital history research article, Simon P. Newman's "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica." The following year brought a six-essay review forum of Newman's article and two state-of-the-field essays by Molly O'Hagan Hardy on digital archives and Sharon Block on digital research. For a supposedly stuffy old journal, the WMQ is looking awfully spry and nimble.²

Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly's "Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives" is the latest installment in the journal's move toward digital scholarship. In addition to the print article that appeared in the WMQ's October 2019 issue, the journal has published an online version that incorporates audio clips, videos, photographs, and other images.³ I will leave it to my fellow reviewers to evaluate the article's contributions to Indigenous studies, historical musicology, religious history, and early American history. Instead, I will be evaluating "Singing Box 331" through the lens of digital history: how it fits within the larger landscape of the field and its strengths and weaknesses as a digital project. At first, this might seem like a curious focus. After all, the phrase "digital history" does not actually appear in the main text of the article, nor does "digital humanities." Wheeler and Eyerly's writing lacks the methodological and theoretical framing one usually sees from digital historians. They offer no discussion of computational methods, no posturing about the affordances of technology for humanities research, and no pontificating about "digital" versus "traditional" scholarship. Nevertheless, "Singing Box 331" is an important work of digital history.

The field of digital history is no longer shiny and new. Flagship journals such as the WMQ, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of American History are regularly publishing digital history scholarship and reviews. You can find digital history panels at almost any major academic conference. Graduate programs are offering students more and more digital history courses. Scholars are going up for tenure with digital projects in their dossiers. Compared to even a few years ago, digital history practitioners no longer have to endlessly justify this approach or proselytize about its "potential." Scholars such as Wheeler and Eyerly are simply going ahead and doing it.

"Singing Box 331" exemplifies several recent trends within the field of digital history. First, Wheeler and Eyerly's focus on sound is emblematic of an expanding umbrella of methods and sources. For the past decade, most computational historical analysis has tended to draw from a handful of approaches: mapping, text mining, and network analysis. Skim through the first two volumes of Current Research in Digital History, a recently launched digital history journal, and you will see an array of articles that use these techniques.⁴ A similar emphasis on maps, texts, and networks can be found in the Programming Historian, a widely used collection of some eighty-plus online tutorials for digital history.⁵ In recent years, however, digital historians are starting to move beyond this traditional set of sources and methods. To take one example, an explosion in computing power and machine-learning techniques has opened up new avenues for processing and analyzing visual sources such as photographs, paintings, and films.⁶ "Singing Box 331" similarly takes the...