Sarita Alami (closest), Sara Palmer and Katie Rawson are hard at work on Lincoln Logarithms. Not pictured: Moya Bailey (photographer).

About

The Digital Scholarship Commons and Beck Center of Emory University‘s Woodruff Library, teamed up to bring attention some little-known digital resources the university has to offer. Both units are charged with handling critical pieces of Emory’s digital projects, but Lincoln Logarithms is the first time that these separate entities have been united in cause.

The Beck Center curates digital library collections and works to create electronic text resources of historic and fragile documents. It has digitized fifty-seven full text sermons given on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination which live in the collection, The Martyred President: Sermons Given on the Occasion of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The collection is just one of many that the Beck Center has created. In thinking about ways to best highlight the collection and the generative possibilities of digital humanist inquiry, the graduate fellows of DiSC, Sarita Alami, Moya Bailey, and Katie Rawson, along with Sara Palmer in the Beck Center, decided to explore how using text-mining and visualization tools can help us study these sermons. Using digital tools like Voyant, Viewshare, PaperMachines, and MALLET, the DiSC/Beck Collaborators hope to pique interest in the collection by highlighting possible sites of further inquiry for interested scholars and the public.

We unveiled our work Friday, February 22, 2013 in anticipation of the Academy Awards on Sunday, where the film Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, was up for twelve awards.