Mission, Vision, & History
Experiment in community. The Scholars’ Lab cultivates an interdisciplinary research community for critical, creative, and just explorations of the intersections of technology and culture.
Our work. While much of our work investigates cultural and humanities questions, we are open to everyone and routinely bring our skillsets to all areas of interdisciplinary research and teaching, broadly defined. Our staff offer deep expertise in digital humanities, computer and information science, spatial technologies, maker, and cultural heritage approaches.
We foster technology-driven research interventions; critical modes of data and algorithmic inquiry; and the ethical design, development, and uses of digital tools and methods. We prioritize public scholarship, healthy collaboration, and accurate credit for all participants.
Our staff maintain ongoing research activity and external professional and scholarly engagement, increasing our familiarity with the latest tools and methods, and informing future Scholars’ Lab services. Our leadership in international scholarly and professional organizations and communities lets us connect UVA colleagues to the forefront of digital and experimental scholarship, new collaborators, and exciting opportunities.
People & community. We offer students, faculty, staff, and local community members consultation and collaboration, teaching and training, and supportive spaces for anyone curious about pushing scholarly boundaries through creative, computational research practices.
Our “people over projects” motto means our mission is creating and empowering colleagues as capable digital scholarly practitioners in their own rights; and our most important outcome has been cultivating just, caring, and inspiring scholarly community in support of that mission.
We are foremost a space for learning together—about anything—by trying stuff. Think of us as friends and colleagues who can help you teach yourself new ways of approaching your interests. We’d love you to be part of our community!
How we do this work matters. We believe advancing social justice is both a key responsibility and opportunity of all scholarship. Digital and experimental scholarship offer particular possibilities for pursuing justice and care. In our work, we strive to create opportunities for inclusion, equity, diversity, and accessibility, including through attention (both learning and teaching) to unequal power dynamics, racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression that limit both justice and knowledge-building. We capture the Scholars’ Lab’s values and goals in our team-authored charter.
Our history. Since 2006, the Scholars’ Lab has served as the UVA Library’s interdisciplinary digital humanities research center. In 2023, our colleagues in the longstanding Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) moved into the Library, joining us as allied institutions within the umbrella of the Library’s Digital Humanities Center.
What we are not
We strongly believe investment in the direct practice of experimental methods is the key to transformative experiences for individual scholars, as well as the best leveraging of our resources on behalf of UVA. Therefore, we do not provide general design, web development, or technical services. We spend the majority of our time teaching people to build and practice digital scholarship themselves, and building things with people (e.g. as peer scholars, co-PIs on grant proposals), rather than building things for people (e.g. as a service, for hire).