Digital Humanities Program Partners

TEACH, the Tennessee Electronic Atlas of Culture and History, as we conceive it, is only feasible if it is developed, maintained, and owned by an extensive network of cultural organizations throughout the state. Our partners for this pilot project are the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, the Tennessee Geographic Alliance, the Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association, and seven small museums and other cultural agencies in the three-county pilot area. We also intend to involve several state, regional and national organizations through our project committees, and will be integrating this project with a project called Volunteer Voices which seeks to provide online access to Tennessee's culture and history and is Phase II of the Tennessee Electronic Library and a project of TENN-SHARE, a consortium of 300 Tennessee libraries.

Our principal and coordinating partner will be the award-winning Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association, a community-based agency primarily supported by McMinn, Monroe, and Polk County governments, whose purpose is to promote and preserve the natural and cultural resources of these counties through a heritage tourism program that increases visitation, serves as an educational tool, and acts as a catalyst for economic development. The Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association will be a contributing partner (i.e., will contribute narratives to the atlas) and has on-going working relationships with the other potential contributing partners throughout the three counties. Most of these organizations also have long-term relationships with Humanities Tennessee in projects involving the gathering, compiling, authenticating, analyzing and sustaining of narratives about their place.

In a state where many, maybe most, of the geographic lines drawn by governments have not made sense since people stopped riding to the county seat on horseback, the Overhill boundaries form something like a historical and cultural region. We also like that these boundaries do not correspond to any single governmental boundary (typically of little meaning to tourists), and that the Overhill Heritage Association has successfully negotiated the complexities of working with multiple local and state government entities. The Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association is a community-based 501(c)3 organization that is not only culturally sensitive but politically savvy. Community narratives are almost always in some sense political narratives, and the Overhill knows how to handle both real and potential conflicts concerning community stories.

Another vital partner in this project is the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, which will be responsible for linking databases of cultural records to Geographic Information Systems. The Department of Geography is already responsible for the Tennessee Geographic Alliance's web-accessible Tennesee Electronic Atlas, a project designed to provide information about our state and act as gateway for persons interested in Tennessee. Our proposed atlas and this atlas are perfectly complementary.

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