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.
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).
Much of our work falls into the form of consultation, collaboration, and community- and expertise-building:
Consults
As a UVA Library unit, we follow the model of reference librarian consultations and welcome everyone in the UVA community to meet with us for a brief consultation session around experimental methods. During your consult, we can help you:
- get started practicing experimental methods via the digital humanities, spatial technologies, and/or cultural heritage scholarship scholarly communities, e.g. connecting you to resources for self-teaching and our scholarly networks at UVA and internationally
- conceptualize and scope a project
- create or find, manage, and use data
- use our GIS software, virtual/augmented reality equipment, or humanities Makerspace
- review your ongoing work, such as critiquing your design and code
Collaboration
As scholars from a variety of disciplines, we also have (limited) availability for more in-depth research or pedagogical collaborations with other UVA folks. Our decisions about longer-term research collaboration are based on the bandwidth, resources, skills, and interests/mission of all parties. Deeper resource investments benefit when all parties are familiar with the working style and values of collaborators. Therefore, most of our collaborations are outgrowths of previous involvement in our community, such as through short consultations or attending our events.
- We build things with people (e.g. as peer scholars, co-PIs on grant proposals), but we do not build things for people.
- We do not provide general design, web development, or technical services. We do our best to help folks stuck on technical questions during our regular Open Office Hours, and are happy to refer to expertise and facilities around UVA (e.g. DH@UVA, Research Data Services, Teaching & Learning team, Data Sciences Institute, IATH).
- Our staff offer years of scholarly experience, including advanced scholarly and professional degrees. With at least one term’s notice we may collaborate on syllabus design or module teaching, and after longer relationships formally co-teach courses.
- Faculty who seek support for digital assignments in their courses or short-term tech instruction should begin with their subject librarian, well in advance. They can connect you with the Library’s experts in copyright, data organization (metadata), digital project preservation, research data, and teaching and learning. We recommend consultation with the A&S Learning Design and Technology staff. The UVA Library’s Course Enrichment Grants and Faculty Research Sprints are another route to collaborating with Library staff (including Scholars’ Lab staff).
We love to work together with other folks at UVA and beyond! Our decisions about longer-term research collaboration are based on the bandwidth, resources, skills, and interests/mission of all parties, and are usually an outgrowth of shorter consultations and SLab community involvement. Please contact us for an initial consult to discuss ideas.
Community Lab
In addition to the consultations and collaborations stated above, much of our time for in-depth work is spent on intentional community design…
- Providing GIS support to the entire university
- Innovating the mentorship and teaching of experimental approaches to scholarship, both in the library and in the field (e.g. via our ~60 formal student role opportunities each year)
- Piloting future Library and UVA initiatives like our Praxis Program (one of the historic UVA DH strengths behind the new DH graduate certificate)
- Bringing speakers to Grounds, hosting events, teaching workshops series; sponsoring student- and faculty-run events; weekly Open Office Hours that anyone can join
- A local newsletter publicizing opportunities (sign up on the front page of ScholarsLab.org)
…and on strengthening existing cutting-edge staff expertise:
- Innovating 3D cultural heritage data gathering, modeling, preservation, and scholarship
- Public Makerspace innovating research and teaching with 3D printing, electronics, fabric arts, and other scholarly making
- Advancing the Library’s values via internal collaborations (e.g. building tools to preserve the record of major campus events with Preservation and Special Collections colleagues)
- Internal research shaping the scholarly fields we’re part of (e.g. developing our Neatline tool for critical storytelling in time and space) and connecting UVA folks to these fields