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.
Mapping the Digital Diaspora of a Dissertation Research Blog
At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture. Read the rest of this entry »
About the Author
Wendy Hsu
Wendy Hsu is a PhD candidate in the Critical and Comparative Studies Program in the music department. Read her research blog @ YellowBuzz.org.
Illuminating Historical Architecture
Following up on my introduction to using 3D models to recreate archaeological sites and perform meaningful academic analysis on simulated virtual environments, I will discuss in further detail my current project concerning the recreation of the House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria, the port city of Roman Antioch.
Mining and Mapping Apocalyptic Texts, Part 2
As I explained in my last blog post, my dissertation will compare several statements about the final fate of humankind in Paul to similar statements in apocalyptic texts. In that post, I described how text-mining could help with the interpretation of the texts which stand at the center of my dissertation. In this post, I will discuss how geographic information systems (GIS) can help to visualize geographic relationships among texts. My ideas here, as in my first blog post, are the result of conversations with other staff members here at the Scholars’ Lab. The question that I pose and answer in this blog post is, What does geography have to do with the analysis of biblical texts? The short answer is, “Much, in every way.” But I can’t just assert that, I need to show it.
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.
Mapping Regional Language Use
So for the thousandth (or so it seems) time I’ve gotten into this discussion with my friends from the East Coast and Midwest (I’m from Texas) about the correct way to refer to a sweet carbonated beverage, and I have finally got to thinking about ways to map locally spoken slang and jargon using GIS. Starting a database of ‘events’ where a person uses unique language in reference to a common-place item or occurrence (I have a friend from Wisconsin who calls the drinking fountain a “bubbler”) would be an insightful way to examine how jargon or slang starts and spreads geographically.Read more…
Rome Reborn
My wife and I frequently engage in a strange kind of “culture war.” She thinks ancient Rome is the more interesting civilization, and I’m partial to ancient Greece. In these debates, I always tell her that I prefer philosophers to politicians. Still, I was excited when I first encountered Rome Reborn, a joint project between UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, a few other schools, and Google (who allows access to the project through Google Earth). Read more…
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.
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…
