Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
Through the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab will host a three-track Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library in November 2009 and May 2010. This Institute will bring scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and software developers together to support and develop geospatial projects and methods in the digital humanities. The NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program will support travel and lodging for 40 attendees as well as Institute faculty members. Dedicated funding is available for graduate students as well as faculty attendees. The Scholars’ Lab will provide $40,000 in funding for short-term scholar- and developer-in-residencies in humanities GIS to complement the Institute.
The Scholars’ Lab also will develop and host an online information clearinghouse and fund visiting fellows in an effort to promote ongoing scholarly engagement, software development, and information sharing by Institute attendees around the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.
See the Institute web site for more information — including application deadlines for each of our three “tracks,” on Stewardship, Software, and Scholarship.
Day of Digital Humanities 2009
Ever wonder how folks in the Scholars’ Lab spend their day? Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the UVA Library and Joseph Gilbert, Head of the Scholars’ Lab, recently participated in the “Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities” project initiated by our friends at the University of Alberta. The “Day of DH” project encouraged scholars, administrators, students, and others who self-identify as “digital humanists” to blog about their day on March 18, 2009. You can read about Bethany’s day and Joseph’s day, as well as the experiences of a host of other participants.
Library Innovation Grant Yields Dividends for Numismatists
A recent post by Ethan Gruber, a UVA Library staff member who has lately joined the Scholars’ Lab team, detailed his experiments with 3-dimensional modeling to re-contextualize Roman mosaics — right down to the interplay of light and shadow in ancient villas. Now Ethan’s work on creating a scholarly interface for the study of Greek and Roman coins has been profiled in UVA Today. This project came about through an internal UVA Library Innovation Grant and was undertaken in consultation with Art History professor John Dobbins, a 1994 IATH Fellow, whose Pompeii Forum project provided an early example for the utility of digital tools for archaeological inquiry. The rare coins were scanned by Andrew Curley of the Library’s Scholarly Resources Digitization Services.
Photo credit: Dan Addison. Read the full UVA Today press release here, or jump straight to the coins collection.
Social Media and the Inauguration
Join us in the Scholars’ Lab Monday morning through Wednesday night next week, as we project the social media landscape surrounding next week’s historic presidential inauguration.
We’ll be showing real-time Twitter and Flickr feeds that record people’s responses to the event and their efforts at citizen-journalism. We’ve also created a home-grown geospatial visualization so that you can follow the worldwide conversation!
Visit the Lab for a little social interaction of your own, or access the site (which includes more information and related links) online.
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
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.
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!
“Digital Therapy” luncheon
Please join us in the Scholars’ Lab at noon on Tuesday, September 9th, as we introduce our new Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities as part of our first “Digital Therapy” Faculty and Grad Luncheon of the semester.
With projects in social networking, geospatial analysis, and cultural mapping, these three doctoral candidates — Jean Bauer of the History Department, Pierre Dairon of the French Department, and Abigail Holeman of the Anthropology Department — are applying exciting new methods to the study of early American history, French literature, and Mesoamerican cosmology. Each will speak briefly about his or her research, and a free lunch will be served.
Hello, world!
I’m here to cut the ribbon on the Scholars’ Lab blog.
The Scholars’ Lab was established two short years ago at UVA Library as a site for innovation in the humanities and social sciences. The idea was to combine the resources and expertise of the Library’s successful Electronic Text (Etext) and Geospatial and Statistical Data (GeoStat) centers with that of UVA’s Research Computing Support Group in a physical space that promotes collaboration and experimentation. Now we’re extending the conversations that happen in our offices and in the SLab to a wider forum.
The past two years have seen amazing work by our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and by scholars from a variety of disciplines and fields who work in collaboration with our on-site experts. Over the coming months, we’ll be inviting our Fellows, grad student consultants, Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, visiting scholars, and UVA collaborators to share this blog and make it their own. The substantive (and CC-licensed) posts you’ll find here will be vetted to ensure that they represent sound scholarship and are squarely on-topic. We’ll also use this space to share announcements about SLab events and links to interesting and evocative uses of technology in the humanities and social sciences.
We invite you to comment and engage with us here!
About the Author
Bethany Nowviskie
Bethany is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.
Read more about Bethany and access her other posts here.
