Editor's Note
- Editor's Note
THIS "Article Forum" is the second published by the William and Mary Quarterly. The Forums center on WMQ articles with particularly rich digital components. The goal is to extend the conversation about these innovative and challenging essays. I also very much hope that these Forums will encourage readers who may not be inclined to engage with the projects' digital elements, and the practice of early American digital scholarship more generally, to venture beyond the printed page. The first "Article Forum" featured a discussion of Simon P. Newman's "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," a born-digital article that the WMQ published on the OI Reader app in June 2018.1
The current Forum considers Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly's "Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives." A print version of the article appeared in the WMQ's October 2019 issue. The companion website came online the following month. The site offers readers a chance to chart their own path through the article's text, along with musical recordings, videos, and images that are critical to the article's purpose. That website remains available via that issue's page on the OI's website (https://oieahc.wm.edu/publications/wmq/browse/october-2019/), but on June 1, 2020, the digital version of this article appeared on the new OI Reader, a web-based app available on desktop, phone, and tablet at https://oireader.wm.edu. Any reader with internet access can engage with Wheeler and Eyerly's article (and Newman's) via that URL free of charge.
The Forum that follows brings together scholars with expertise in Native American and Indigenous Studies, digital history, music history, and Moravian history to discuss and evaluate Wheeler and Eyerly's article and its digital elements. Wheeler and Eyerly's response closes the Forum but not, I trust, the ongoing exchange about both their innovative article and the process of creating and publishing early American digital scholarship.
Footnotes
1. Simon P. Newman, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth-and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," William and Mary Quarterly (OI Reader), June 2018, 1–53; "Article Forum on Newman's 'Hidden in Plain Sight': The Potential of Digital Platforms for Long-Form Scholarship," WMQ 71, no. 1 (January 2019): 3–40.
