Digital Humanities

The Scholars' Lab offers longstanding expertise in the digital humanities (DH):

All 11 Scholars' Lab staff have experience working in the digital humanities (DH); our Spatial Technologies and Makerspace programs regularly work with DH practitioners, as well as scholars from other departments all over UVA.

To get started, email ScholarsLab@Virginia.edu and we'll get you scheduled to meet with the right experts!

Critical DH: Theory & Scholarly Field

Scholars' Lab offers expertise in the critical digital humanities (DH). Much of the lab's work draws on our strong DH background (including for non-DH projects and people!) and many of our staff identify as digital humanists. We use "critical" DH here to mean purposeful engagements with the field and community of DH scholarship, including its writings, theory, and international community.

Our four areas of high-level expertise (code + design, spatial technologies, makerspace, DH pedagogy) all routinely overlap with critical DH work, including through consultation, collaboration, teaching, staff-initiated research, and staff leadership and service in external discplinary and methodological fields. Beyond these, "critical DH" captures our high level of engagement in external, international DH leadership, service, and community:

This active leadership and engagement directly benefits UVA, allowing us to:

  • stay up to date on the latest trends in theory, methodologies, tools, equipment; ready to help UVA folks when they come to use wanting to learn about something new
  • participate in setting trends in digital scholarship, including through our prominent model as a DH center focused on social justice, community care, and growing the next generation of DH scholars
  • alert you to the latest opportunities (e.g. grants, conferences)
  • easily amplify your work through our social media channels and personal connections
  • connect you to external collaborators, mentors, and reviewers
  • invite exciting, innovative public speakers to UVA
  • help you explore and apply for careers and external fellowships (including alternative academic, non-academic, technology, and galleries/archives/libraries/museums roles)

Our award-winning research blog and active, influential academic social media presence are key to our ongoing Critical DH scholarship. We're a founding member of Centernet, the international alliance of digital humanities organizations, and one of the DH centers with the most dedicated DH staff in the world. Our staff are in-demand external DH speakers, hold current and past elected and appointed leadership roles with our international digital humanities scholarly organization, and serve as editors on peer-reviewed DH and DH-adjacent publications such as The Programming Historian and The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. We are sought out by deans, administrators, and faculty at an international array of universities for advice and consultation on creating and improving their DH centers, initiatives, and curricula. Our specialty in nurturing the next generation of DH scholars means we have an active network of SLab alumni who have gone on to found their own, SLab-influence DH nodes at places including Yale, CUNY, and Columbia University.

Our Critical DH work takes forms including an external speaker series focused on identifying exciting early career digital humanists charting where DH will go next; offering themed reading recommendations and bibliographies; maintaining a DH reference collection (Digital Humanities Working Library), and publishing written DH methodological tutorials.

DH Pedagogical Consultation & Collaboration

The lab offers expertise in digital humanities (DH) and experimental scholarship pedagogies, including at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels. We offer consultation, syllabus review, co-teaching, and other forms of support for developing digital pedagogy and implementing it in the classroom, and our leadership and participation in the external DH community allows us to inform and be informed by the latest DH pedagogy research and practice.

We frequently publish on critical digital pedagogies, including in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy; in edited volumes including The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities and What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom; and in other public formats such as Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments and #DLFTeach Toolkit: Lesson Plans for Digital Library Instruction.

Related research blogging

Our research blog offers a number of pieces related to critical digital pedagogies: