Exciting progress on the Moravian Lives project!

Progress report

The project development team at Bucknell University has been very busy in the last few months.

As was reported on the Bucknell University DPS blog at the beginning of the summer, work is continuing on a couple of fronts. Our Bucknell student “super transcriber”, Carly Masonheimer ’21 has been doing a fantastic job of transcribing the English language materials and now, thanks to generous support from both the Bucknell Unversity Center for the Humanities and the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem this June Carly was able to attend the German Script seminar at the Moravian Archives and is transcribing the German script materials! Further transcription work has been done by Marita Gruner, doctoral candidate at the University of Greifswald, Germany.

This fall, Sarah Kannemann, a doctoral student in the field of Church History at the University of Mainz in Germany, will be coming to Bucknell as a visiting scholar to learn “the Bucknell DH method,” and work closely with project leaders, Faull and Jakacki. She will also carry out archival research at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. Thanks go to Prof. Craig Atwood at the Center for Moravian Studies at Moravian Seminary for supporting Sarah’s stay in Bethlehem.  Further cutting-edge platform development is planned this fall at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz where as part of this exchange, our project developer, Michael McGuire ‘07, will also be teaching a module of the Mainz DH summer school, focusing on the Bucknell “Moravian Lives” project.

New UK Materials

In March 2018, Katie Faull travelled to the Fulneck archives in Yorkshire, UK.  Fulneck was one of the most important Moravian communities in the UK in the 18th century, visited at its founding by Zinzendorf, Anna Nitschmann, Spangenberg and other leading figures in the early church.  The archives there are well-organized, thanks to the work of Rev. Hilary Smith.  While at Fulneck, with the help of her volunteer research assistant, Jane Faull, she was able to digitize the whole as yet uncatalogued collection of Single Sister’s memoirs, as well as a part of the other Choirs’ memoirs.  We are very excited to announce that this collection of Single Sisters memoirs is now available for transcription on the transcription desk!

This new Fulneck collection joins the other UK materials on the site. In January 2017, Faull digitized a sizeable proportion of the memoirs in the Fetter Lane collection at Church House, Muswell Hill, London. These have already been partially transcribed and form part of the primary materials corpus for Faull’s HUMN 100 The Humanities Now! course at Bucknell in fall 2018.

Latest Scholarly Output

Faull and McGuire will be using the transcribed materials from the Moravian Lives website as their research corpus for a jointly presented paper “Analyzing Moravian Feelings: Using Computational Methods to ask Questions about Norms and Sentiments in Moravian Lebensläufe” at the 5th International Pietism Congress in Halle, Saxony later in August 2018.  We will also be using the opportunity of the Congress to hold our first International Steering Committee meeting for the Moravian Lives project, on which scholars from Germany, the US, Australia, Sweden, and Labrador sit.

Financial support for the Moravian Lives project has come (on the US side) from Bucknell Univesity’s L&IT, the President’s Office, the Bucknell Humanities Center and funds from Faull’s Presidential Professorship. In Sweden, the project has been funded by the Center for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg and also its Center for Digital Humanities; and in Germany funds have come from the federal state of the Rheinland-Palatinate awarded to the University of Mainz’ Professor Wolfgang Breul.

Moravian Lives research collaborators include the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA, the Unity Archives in Herrnhut, Germany, the Moravian Archives in London and Fulneck, U.K., the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Students who are involved on the project include Carly Masonheimer ‘21, Marleina Cohen ‘21, and Bucknell graduates Khoi Le ‘18 and Michael McGuire ‘07.