Issues with translations - Walt Whitman and Jorge Luis Borges
A couple of summers ago, I was desperate for a job so I caved. This was not, in fact, the first time. I remember typing Leaves of Grass for a whole nickel a page before I knew how to type properly, painstakingly pecking out what was then incomprehensible text. During my summer and winter break of 2006, then a proficient typist who had learned a bit of Spanish, I got a pay increase and went to work for my dad, Ken Price, encoding Álvaro Armando Vasseur’s 1912 translation of Whitman’s poetry for the Walt Whitman Archive.
While working on the project, I did not reflect much upon the problems of translations, both within themselves and the issues and concerns in their representation on archives like the Whitman Archive. Frankly, I was too preoccupied about my quickly-approaching study abroad trip to Madrid. Read more…
Map “Vocabularies”
For the past year, I have been working on the Scholars’ Lab Geospatial Data Portal, the lab’s effort to make our GIS data sets readily available to UVA students, faculty, and staff via the world wide web by using a suite of open source, open standards-based applications. A particular aspect of this project that I have enjoyed exploring is the way in which we display our visual information.
Stop to think about the last paper map you used. Minor roads were probably displayed with a line of a certain color and thickness, highways with another. Green spaces were colored differently from open water and buildings etcetera. Cartographers have long toiled to develop visual representations of our environment and make them identifiable for the greater use. Read more…
Place, Space, Maps, and More on GIS Day
Join us next Wednesday, November 19th, as we celebrate all things International GIS Day. Anyone whose work is grounded in issues of space and place will find something of interest in these cross-disciplinary offerings, centering in cartography and geospatial technologies.
Of special note is a public lecture by David Rumsey, who has worked for a decade to offer open access to his remarkable private map collection through a variety of innovative tools and interfaces. Most recently, he has made historical maps available as layers in Google Earth and on an island in Second Life. Mr. Rumsey will speak on “Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies” at 4 o’clock in the Harrison-Small auditorium. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Emerging Research, Scholarship, and Arts at UVA (CERSA) and the Scholars’ Lab, and a reception will follow the talk.
Click here for the full schedule of events.
Image from the David Rumsey Map Collection
Iterative Cosmologies…
“During the Zuni Molawia ceremonial of 1915, when the house-tops were crowded, the roof of one of the houses enlarged that season caved in. The accident occurred, people began to say, because turquoise had not been deposited under the floor of the new chamber.”
Elsie Clews Parsons
Pueblo Indian Religion Vol. 1, 1939, p.105
The quote above, read some time ago, was one of the first things I read that spoke to the deeper meaning of many of the “ritual deposits” found by archaeologists. Specifically, how these deposits were connected to built space. I have since encountered innumerable studies from Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Religious Studies, etc., that show how built space and the associated material are microcosms of a larger worldview. These studies demonstrate how space becomes place within a certain cultural logic. Read more…
Google Scholar: Neglected Corridors of the Interwebs
Welcome to my first post here on the Scholars’ Lab blog. My name is Jason Kirby and I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in the Music department at UVa. I’m in the “Critical and Comparative Studies” track of my program, which means I look at musical sound and musicians through a cultural studies lens. I’m planning a dissertation on intersections between country and rock music over the past thirty years, and when considering the wide spectrum of academic musicology, I’m squarely a pop music studies guy. I’ve written about artists ranging from Lucinda Williams to Throbbing Gristle—artists about whom there’s a fair amount of popular-press ink spilled, but not necessarily much scholarly writing (yet). This brings me to the subject of today’s post.
Google Scholar: I enjoy it, and not for reasons which are necessarily immediately apparent. Read more…
Art in the SLab
A bright, sunny, open space like the Scholars’ Lab begs to be filled not only with students and faculty collaborating on digital projects, but also with art! We’re pleased to follow last semester’s successful showing of the watercolors of E. F. Chilton with this semester’s photography exhibit by our own Jean Bauer.
Jean is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UVA and a 2008-2009 Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Scholars’ Lab. Her exhibit, entitled “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Slices of the (Mostly) Natural World”, is on display in the Lab right now.
Bamboo Grows Quickly
In July I attended the fourth Bamboo Planning Workshop, held at Princeton University. For those of you unfamiliar with Project Bamboo (as distinct from the feeding of pandas), Bamboo is a series of workshops on the future of digital humanities designed by UC Berkeley and my alma mater, the University of Chicago. The workshops are bringing together humanities scholars, content providers, administrators, and central IT personnel from universities to design an organization that will serve the needs of the digital humanities community.
Typically, only high ranking faculty and administrators get to go, but after juggling the summer schedules of a small staff, my boss at Documents Compass, Holly Shulman, was kind enough to take me with her.
In the first general session it quickly dawned on me that I was close to the only non-conference-staff graduate student in the room. So, as they were passing around the cordless mic, I took a deep breath and raised my hand. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
Biblical Statistics
The first topic that I chose for my dissertation in UVA’s Department of Religious Studies was the “School of Saint Paul.” I hoped to show the existence of a group of followers who surrounded Paul and engaged with him in the interpretation of the Old Testament. In order to do this, I decided to investigate how Paul used scripture in his epistles and how the followers of Paul used the same scripture in their writings. I anticipated finding certain portions of the Old Testament that either were used exclusively in the Pauline and post-Pauline literature or were used differently in the Pauline and post-Pauline literature than in the rest of the New Testament.
But I had a problem. Read more…
About the Author
Matthew Munson
Matt is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies and a Scholars' Lab graduate consultant.
Read more about Matt and access his other posts here.
Feeds, Coins, and Maps (oh, my)
Staff from across the Library are offering learning opportunities through the Scholars’ Lab this week!
First, Keith Weimer and Chris Ruotolo will give a workshop on using syndication to stay on top of news sources and scholarly journals. Then, Chris Gist and Kelly Johnston will host the first meeting of an ongoing faculty/grad discussion group on geospatial technology for the humanities. Finally, Ethan Gruber will present an innovative interface he has created to the UVA Art Museum’s collection of Greek and Roman coins.
Check our calendar for dates and times!
Normality: For or Against?
I’m a historian who is currently designing and/or building four databases. As I work through the complexities of each project, I’m struck by two thoughts.
First: I’m overworked.
Second: I like the way relational algebra makes me think.
Good database design involves breaking a data set into the smallest viable components and then linking those components back together to facilitate complex analysis. This process, known as normalization, helps keep the data set free of duplicates and protects the data from being unintentionally deleted or unevenly updated.
As I research merchants in the eighteenth century and how they connected people and empires with far-flung locations and transfered goods and ideas across oceans, I find it helpful to break those multivalent connections into discrete units. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
