Welcoming our 2012/13 Graduate Fellows

The Scholars’ Lab is very excited to announce the recipients of the 2012-13 UVA Library Graduate Fellowships in the Digital Humanities:

David Flaherty Corcoran Department of History

David’s project, part of his dissertation ‘Improving and Enlarging Your Majesty’s Dominions in America:’ The Board of Trade’s Vision for a British Atlantic Empire, 1713-63, will use the entries of the British Board of Trade’s Journal to create a database and maps “that will reveal the Board’s network of correspondents and the widespread places that drew their attention.”  The visualizations will show “precisely when and where the [Board’s] Commissioners directed their energies to gather more knowledge about the colonies and to pursue the implementation of part of their vision of empire,” allowing David “to recreate, literally, the Commissioners’ geographical ‘vision.’”

Lydia Rodriguez Department of Anthropology

Lydia’s project, part of her dissertation Thinking Gesture: The Dialectics of Language, Gesture, and Thought in Chol Maya, focuses on “the analysis of the gestures that co-occur with temporal utterances” among Chol Maya speakers of Northern Chiapas, Mexico. She intends to create a database of Chol Maya temporal gestures “that will allow me to perform quantitative and qualitative analysis on the frequency and types of gestures co-occurring with temporal utterances” and a website that will allow her to share this data with colleagues working in Maya languages or in gesture research.

Annie Swafford Department of English

Annie’s project, “Songs of the Victorians,” is a digital scholarly tool facilitating “interdisciplinary discussions of Victorian poetry and corresponding Victorian parlor song musical settings.”  Part of her dissertation, the project will achieve this by “combin[ing] close readings of both Victorian poems and musical settings of them in an interactive environment” based on audio files, visual representations of musical scores, and presentations of poetic texts.  Annie has also held fellowships in the NINES program over the past two years and in the Scholars’ Lab’s Praxis Program in 2011-2012.

The Scholars’ Lab will schedule a luncheon in September at which our new Fellows will be introduced and will in turn be given the opportunity to introduce their projects.  We’re delighted to have them as part of the SLab community!