Dr. Amy DeRogatis, Professor of Religion at Michigan State University, and her partner Isaac Weiner, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, head the  American Religious Sounds Project, a collaborative digital initiative supported by the Henry Luce Foundation that seeks to document and interpret the diversity of American religious life by attending to its varied sonic cultures. I wanted to talk with Dr. DeRogatis because her project reached a notable milestone in 2019, but also because her journey toward Digital Humanities was shaped by a distinctly disciplinary concern.

Keywords

Religion, Sound Studies, Digital Humanities, Undergraduate Research, Graduate Research, Community Engagement, Soundscape

The Conversation

Chambliss: Amy DeRogatis, thank you for joining me here at Reframing History. How are you doing today?

DeRogatis: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.

 Chambliss: Well, I know you’re co-PI [and] Isaac Weiner is unable to join us. He originally was going to be here and I’m sorry to miss him. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to direct people to his information, but I wanted to talk to you for this season of Reframing History, as I mentioned to you before, because we’re talking about Digital Humanities this season and you are my colleague. And for those of you who’ve been listening, you know that I’ve talked to quite a few people at MSU at this point. I was really intrigued in part because we’re MSU; we have this massive email system that sometimes gives us information about digital humanities and I saw that your project, which I knew you’ve been working on for a while, reach a really public stage.

The American Religious Sound Project, which is a project between you and Isaac and between MSU and Ohio State, is now live. And I’d been to the website, seen the interface, seen all the stuff that you’ve been doing there. And I thought it would be really great to talk to you about that. I know that you published Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism in 2015 and I was also intrigued by the fact that I thought to myself, this is the next big project and it’s digital, which is really interesting. Tell me a little bit about how you got to this point. What was your training and was Digital Humanities always a part of that?

DeRogatis: Thanks so much. First of all, it is so great to be on the podcast with you and [I’m] especially happy to spend some time talking with you because you’re one of my favorite more recent colleagues here and we usually meet in the hall or sadly meet in a meeting. It’s such a great opportunity to feel like we’re just chatting it up in a coffee shop and such a privilege to be with you today. Thank you so much.

There is the genesis of the actual project, which I am happy to talk about, and there’s also the beginning story; the myth story for me around my entrance into Digital Humanities. Let me start by saying that my co-director, Isaac Weiner, who’s a professor in the comparative literature program at Ohio State University and is also a specialist [on] religion in the United States as I am, wrote a dissertation that was published into a book called Religion Out Loud. That was published I think in 2014 [by] NYU press. And that book was about—here I’m speaking for him—so just broadly speaking, one of the themes of that book was religious noise controversies over the centuries in the United States. [He] did a lot of work on the ways in which religious sound can be seen as sound or noise depending on who’s making claims about it. And that sound often brings communities together in what’s often seen as secular spaces as well as sacred spaces. And it’s just a terrific, amazing book.

One of the chapters is around a sound controversy in Hamtramck, Michigan. His first job was at Georgia State. He teamed up with a faculty member there and they were incorporating audio recordings into classroom activities. While he was at Georgia State, he had started this project and gained experience doing field recordings around religious sound. Then [he] moved to Ohio State and the two of us hooked up around a funding opportunity called Humanities Without Walls (HWW). That year, they were interested in people who would do collaborative research across two institutions around the topic of the global Midwest.

Chambliss: Right. So, the Humanities Without Walls grant, where was that from again?

DeRogatis: That’s a Mellon-funded grant administered through the University of Illinois. And so, big long backstory, but we put together parallel teams of faculty and students and did a pilot project over the summer. We called it the Religious Sound Map because, at that point, we were thinking more about sound mapping. [We] applied for a grant [and] got our initial grant through HWW. That was about two years and incorporated classroom activities with a lot of undergraduate researchers. Some [were] paid, some were in classrooms. And we built a nice platform for a religious sound map with some interviews and other stuff. Mostly undergraduates built [it] at MSU and launched that.

But before we launched, the Luce Foundation came to us and said, “We’re hearing about this cool collaborative project, maybe you’d like to scale up and make some changes.” So that was our second phase of the grant, which was primarily hiring a multimedia production person named [Lauren Pond], who’s at Ohio State. It was also hiring some graduate students at both MSU and OSU to project manage, hiring and paying undergraduate researchers at both institutions, doing lots and lots of field recordings, working on getting metadata standards and beginning to build this platform, which [was] primarily built by the OSU app dev team. Then, Luce came back to us again and said, “Would you be interested in scaling up?” And so that is the grant that we’re currently doing. That started last June and this is a much larger grant where we have finished building the site that just went live, but now this grant has four domains.

We’re running an awards competition for scholars and giving out grants for people to do innovative work on religion and sound. And we have an advisory board that’s going to work with the people who get the awards, and then also an app dev team that will help them think about how they’ll present on our platform. It’s multimedia from the get-go. We have geographic expansions, so we’re taking what we’ve learned about using our project in the classroom. We have a manual. We’ve piloted our project at Georgia State, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and St. Louis University. Now we want to move nationally. We’re doing that.

We are going to run a workshop for people interested in religion and sound before our annual conference. . . . We’re doing [a] community engagement domain, which means we’re working with the board we’ve put together and possibly [have] been in conversation with the Smithsonian to do a traveling exhibit. But also [we’re trying] to do workshops for community people who’ve already been recorded by us to learn how to use the equipment and the metadata and then do their own recordings. So, it’s response recordings to what we’ve done. So, lots of fires, lots of excitement all over the place. But the big excitement last week is that this website, this platform that we’ve been working on for basically five years, has finally launched. So, super exciting for us.

Chambliss: One of the things that was really interesting about looking through the project website is it says you aim to offer new resources for documenting [and] interpreting [the] diversity of American religious life by attending to its various sonic cultures. I thought [that] was really interesting because, of course, in the US, I don’t think people necessarily think about—this is going to sound bad but bear with me—the question about religious diversity because it’s a primarily Christian nation in many ways, one of the most Christian nations in the modern world. And in terms of religiosity, adherence to religion, a lot of our public narrative doesn’t necessarily always reflect the great diversity we know exists in the United States in terms of religion for a variety of reasons. Some of [them] political, some of [them] just around privacy, right?

Sound is actually a really intriguing way to reach out to people that kind of resonates, no pun intended. And so, when you’re on the site, you do see a variety of different snapshots that are sonic in nature, but they’re not just all songs. When I first heard the name I was like, “Oh it must all be songs,” but they’re not all songs. And I want you to talk a little about your logic around how you approach this idea of sonic culture because that’s actually probably one of the great nuances of the project and a lot of people would miss it if they just heard the name.

DeRogatis: Right. And thanks for that question because that really does get to the heart of the project. So, there is an answer about engaging the larger public and then there’s an answer about interrogating categories amongst scholars in the study of religion. Clearly, the more interesting question is about engaging the public. Most people, when we came to them and said, “Would you like to be part of our project? We’d like to record,” if they are connected to what we think of as traditional religious communities, they would think immediately of what we might think of as a canonical religious sound. And almost always they think it’s music. Let’s listen to the choir. So, we’ve been very intentionally broad in our thinking of what constitutes sound for some scholarly reasons but also playful reasons, and to allow people to rethink their assumptions pretty quickly.

We are very interested in what communities think of as their main sound. But also, we’re interested in our own categories. Maybe not necessarily representational sound, but often we’re thinking about the sounds of everyday lived practices. So, the chatter and sound of coffee cups at a coffee hour after church instead of a sermon. Or the ambient sounds of the frying at a [Langar] during food at a [gurdwara]. Or, perhaps, a religious group marching down the streets for Black Lives Matters. Just sounds that make you say, “Huh,” and think a little bit more about what counts as religious sound. We also are very interested in the way in which sound allows religious beliefs and practices to travel. So, to travel in spaces beyond maybe a traditional mosque or synagogue or temple. Maybe it can go out onto the street, or that sound allows encounters.

Really thinking a lot about basic things, about what is it we think about when we think about religion and how can we think more broadly if we pay attention to sound? And with sound traveling, where are those spaces that it moves into where people can come together and interact or learn new things? We’ve had all kinds of really fun ideas, especially from our undergraduates. Like, one of my researchers a few years ago got really interested in following the Granger garbage truck around because it has scripture on the back of it. And just recording, you may not know that, but you’ll notice it now when you see the garbage collection [and hear the] recording [of] this truck [and] the sounds of the truck picking up garbage. But [now you will see it] with the knowledge that it’s broadcasting religion, [that] there’s scripture painting on it.

We think about sounds from intentionally religious communities. You can identify a group that says we’re a religious community and here are some of our sounds, but also sounds that are the content [of] religion, right? So, we have a group of sounds that are outside the Republican convention, the last national Republican convention for the presidential election. And we have people who are on the street either from a religious perspective protesting, or part of their protest is about religious content. [For] anyone who stumbles across our website, we want them to sort of think more capaciously about what counts as religious sound. And how do you know it when you hear it? What do you think about from the scholarly perspective? Isaac and I are issuing a call to our colleagues to say, if we want to learn something about religious diversity in the United States, we have to move beyond the traditional methods of text or buildings or the scholarly categories we’re used to associating with thinking and defining and analyzing religion. Sound is one of those ways of not just [getting] at thinking about what counts as religion, but also it gives us a way to get into everyday practices [that] people actually do.

Chambliss: One of the things I’m [also] really interested [in] about this project, I think, is that it’s a really great example of a digital humanities project in the sense that I think you’re achieving something with the platform you could not do purely with paper. Not to say that either you or Isaac are against paper, I’m not suggesting that. If you’re going to send me an evil email, a hateful message, that’s not what I’m saying. Part of the goal, I think, with Digital Humanities is to achieve things that you cannot achieve in traditional form; not to replace it, but to supplement those arguments. It gets me to this question I like to ask everybody who comes on the podcast this season and that’s: how do you define Digital Humanities?

DeRogatis: Right. Thanks. Well, that’s easy to define. There’s a question I’ve never heard.

Chambliss: Everyone’s answer is different and it’s all right.

DeRogatis: There we go. I want to answer your question, but before I do that, I would love to just reiterate that, thank you for noticing that because I think that that is the key, right? That we can write about sound, but this gives people the ability to listen. You have to have the platform for people to actually listen and make decisions for themselves. And, in our case, they can do all kinds of things with those sounds and find the things they want to find or the user can look around the way they want to use the sounds in the site.

The first time I heard people talking about Digital Humanities was not that long ago, [it was] maybe six or seven years ago. And I remember not knowing what that meant at all and having some weird assumptions. And I have a really vivid memory of talking to the person we hired at MSU to be the Digital Humanities librarian. And this person’s name is [Bobby Smiley] and he now works at Vanderbilt. But when he came to Michigan State, he had done a master’s in religious studies at Yale before he did his library science degree. And a friend of mine who had taught him, said, “Oh, this person’s coming. He’s great. You’ve got to talk to him.” And so, I felt like he was a safe person. At our first meeting, I just said, “Could you just tell me what Digital Humanities is? Because I don’t know and I feel like I should know by now.” And what he said to me…I mean, he’s just such a wonderful colleague and did work on our HWW project.

And what he said to me was, “Digital humanities is the use of computational methods to ask new questions about the humanities.” And I remember saying, “Well, what if I don’t know what computational methods are?” He said, “Well then, you might be learning about that, but always think to yourself, what kinds of new questions can we ask if we have these tools? Where will that go?” So that’s always been in the back of my mind. And in fairness to Bobby, I’m sure he said it in a much more sophisticated way, but that was the takeaway I got from it.

Chambliss: I think that’s a very common answer, right? But it does bring me to another question because the complication with Digital Humanities is that a lot of the work is hidden and there’s a lot of work involved.

DeRogatis: 100%. . . . How can we use digital technology to ask new humanities questions and also experience the humanities in a new way? Both of those things. Well, to do that, I don’t have that skill set to do the technology or the archiving or the graphic design. And so, for me, it’s bigger than just the new questions. That’s where you start from. But my experience of Digital Humanities is that it’s wildly collaborative. That you have to find ways of communicating with people across lots of different skillsets to come together and produce something that’s meaningful. And that takes a tremendous amount of time and work and trust.

With our team, it’s not just scholars, community members, undergraduates, [and] graduate students. We’re dealing with technical people and application development with a graphic designer, with [a] multimedia producer, with digital librarians. We’re just about to hire a digital archivist. And none of this can happen without everybody on board [and] everybody being respected for what they bring to the project and being acknowledged and trusted. And so, it’s a very much a process-oriented endeavor. There’s lots of conversation about who’s doing what and when and how can they feel fully included and respected, and who represents this, or who speaks for us. I mean, today, I’m talking to you [and] I am one person in a crowd of many, and you’ll notice I’m trying to mention people by name, even those who were part of the project many years ago, like Bobby Smiley.

It’s not just about the use of digital technology to ask new humanities questions or experience the humanities in new ways. For me, it’s also a fully collaborative endeavor. In our case, and I think in many cases, it is a public-facing endeavor. Not all, but there is often, at least for us—because so much of our data and our research is in community—we involve community partners. And so that’s very different than sitting in, for me at least, a library and writing a book solo. Because I haven’t done ethnography. I’ve been more textual in my writing. [But] this is based in the community. Then you must ask the community, what would you like from this project? You can’t just be extractive. So, collaborative [and] public-facing are the two other things I add to these new questions [and] to the humanities. But I realize that is not the case for all digital projects and I am speaking for myself on behalf of our project that there may be individuals involved in our project who may say, “Oh, I see it just a little bit differently than that.”

Chambliss: Right, yeah. And I think that’s also one of the things that’s very classic Digital Humanities, a collaborative process. [It’s] one of the things about it that makes it complicated in humanities because a lot of the acknowledgement and benchmarks and accolades are designed to [be] given to a person, not a team.

DeRogatis: Exactly. Or the work that goes into building a team, [like] creating a trust and allowing for people to do their thing as part of the project; that labor gets unacknowledged. It’s much more like working in a lab in the sciences than it is writing a book in the humanities. And so, it’s very hard to catch up with that on the humanities side.

Chambliss: Another thing about this project I want to acknowledge is the important work you’ve done with undergrads and grads [regarding] research. . . . When you go through the site, you can see names of people who’ve done recordings and you have a little write ups. Some of it was done by you, but some of them I think by the students, [which] made the recording really reflect a hands-on experience for undergrads. I do that same thing in my class and it’s always interesting because you have to explain to undergrads—at least, I always try to explain it to undergrads—these are the skills you are acquiring while you’re doing this project. Even though all you did was maybe record something or took a picture, because you had to put it into a database, you had to make metadata. There’re these things that you’ve done but you don’t think of them. This is how the Internet actually works.

 DeRogatis: Yeah. When I integrated this, I taught a seminar early on called Religion and the Senses. And [in] the classroom, we were doing content; but many of the sessions in the classroom were what people would think of as technical, [like] learning how to use the audio recorder, thinking about metadata categories, learning how to, at that time, use Omeka. That’s not the platform we use [now], but it was at that time. And then reminding them that, when you write your resume, these are skills that you have.

Yeah, incorporating undergraduates is extremely important for me and also for Isaac, obviously my department is an undergraduate-only department. So, we’re always involved in finding ways to bring undergraduates into our research. I moved pretty quickly from having it as a classroom-base to, once we were able to afford it, paying undergraduate researchers. Having a team and having that outside-of-the-classroom experience became a little bit more workable. But I agree with you, it’s really important to name these skillsets as they’re being acquired.

Chambliss: And with the project reaching this huge milestone again, there’s always this question of the work being hidden and this is, in some ways, when you look at it, not to over blow this, but there’s real success benchmarks in the narrative of this project. It had a big grant. You had a lot of cross-campus collaborative partnerships and foundational support. I mean, these are things [that], if you were writing up your tenure promotion packet, you’d be like, “wah, wah, wah,” because it’s a digital project and projects just don’t fit anywhere. I mean a lot of tenure and promotion guidelines don’t necessarily define things very clearly [for] digital.

DeRogatis: Absolutely. I agree 100% on that.

Chambliss: I do encourage people to go to the interface. You have a really good interface because there’s an archive. You click “archive” [and] you just see the files.

DeRogatis: Project history.

Chambliss: Yeah, you get a project history. But you hit “map,” [and] you see the files on a map. So, you can see you and Isaac are working a kind of geographic area around you. But also, on the site, as you mentioned, there’s [these] grants you have available and I get the impression [from] looking at the site [that] the future of this is that this whole map is going to fill up and you’re going to get people from all across the country out and about recording, adding to the database, so we get this full measure of the American sonic culture.

DeRogatis: Right. And it’s not crowdsourcing though, because we want to make sure that we keep… On the site, we also have our statement of ethics and we have metadata categories. And we want to help people. We want to provide the equipment. So, we’re all using the same recorders. But one of the guiding principles we followed is that we want to record in our own communities. As we go out, I’m not going to send out MSU researchers to Oklahoma to do recording. We want someone in Oklahoma to say, “Hey, I’ve got a reason for wanting to do some recordings, can I partner with you?” We want to expand geographically but always have people working in community. That’s very important to us. And then you will see that the map will expand, expand, expand.

It is the case that, when you know your community well, you have access to people who might be not as willing to be recorded. But you also know when they say, “No, I don’t want to be part of this,” that I think you’re more likely to respect that because you’re living with them. Just because there aren’t examples of some religious communities around mid-Michigan doesn’t mean they don’t exist, right? This has been null factor in the archive. And it doesn’t mean they haven’t been reached out to. It means a choice has been made not to participate, and [that] there are really good reasons not to participate. And then there are some reasons like we just don’t feel like it. But I think [building] that kind of deep knowledge and respect and to continue to live in community together makes me more comfortable that we can follow [the] ethical guidelines that we’ve put together. So, yes; expand, expand, expand, but always coming out of the communities in which people are recording.

Chambliss: And when you think about this process of adhering to your ethical framework and reaching out to people, how long do you foresee the project continuing? This is just you, you’re not speaking for everybody, it’s just you because I can see this project going on for a while. It’s been going on for a while, going on for a good long time. Do you have a sense of, “Okay, the next five years we’re going to be doing this. The next decade we’re going to be doing this”? Or [maybe] you don’t want to even think about the end yet. How much longer can this go on?

DeRogatis: Right. That’s actually always the conversation, especially when it’s time to do another grant. And it’s primarily between me and my co-director, but we always try to include everyone after we’ve thought through where we’re going. I’m just going to speak for myself, that my goal is that, by the time we get to the end of this funding cycle or close to it, we’ve been able to identify people who are part of our growing advisory boards. So, we have advisory boards around community engagement, we have an overall advisory board, [and] we have [an] interpretive scholarship advisory board. We’ve got a bunch. And I’m hoping some of these people, or maybe other people who come into the project, might be in a place where they’d be ready to become a co-director. And so, that wouldn’t mean I would leave, but I would like to see an exit plan for co-directing.

I think it really works to have co-directors. That being said, one of the things from this final grant, this most recent grant from Luce, allowed us to hire a fulltime position for [a] project manager at OSU and then a full time position for a digital archivist at MSU. This digital archivist will be working 50% of their time on our project because we’re moving the archive to the Vinson Voice Library at Michigan State University. The sound archive is going to live at MSU and, just like a rare book room, there’ll be procedures for if you want to come here and listen. There are some recordings you’ll have full access [to], some are partial access, [etc.].

The archivists will also be 50% Digital Humanities and, eventually, we’ll be 100% Digital Humanities once we get through bringing the archive over. Even if I’m not co-director in a few years, the sound archive will be here at MSU. I’m always going to have a hand in it. We’ve got a lot of people across the country who are really passionate about this project and are serving [as] advisory board members or hoping to be part of the geographical expansion. There lots of people who have interacted with us and my hope is that, over the next couple of years, some of them will be in a position to say, “I’d like to co-direct.” And it can maybe move to another region. Maybe working with Isaac, maybe not. I don’t know.

Chambliss: Okay. Well thanks for taking the time to talk with me about this project, I really appreciate it.

DeRogatis: Thank you.

Chambliss: If people want to follow up with you, do you have a website?

DeRogatis: There’s the project website [and] you can follow us on Twitter [@ReligiousSounds]. And we also, on our website, have a contact form. That’s a really good place to get in touch with us. But [I’m] happy to field any questions, suggestions. One thing we didn’t talk about [is] that, besides the archive and the visualizations, we have one other part of our website, which are audio essays that are highly curated by our multimedia producer, Lauren Pond. And that’s another way to engage, rather than searching through an archive to just see how somebody would put together the audio based around themes or maybe a specific location. I also want to encourage people to go to that part, too. You just click under the gallery tag at the top of the website.