A video stream of the final event of our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship (or #geoinst as it’s known on Twitter) is now available! Thanks to all our wonderful participants for making these lightning talks, collectively entitled “Frontiers in Spatial Humanities,” so thought-provoking.
The Scholars’ Lab/NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship was held at the University of Virginia Library May 25-27, 2010 and concluded with a set of two-minute, three-slide lightning talks by Institute attendees on their own spatial humanities projects and works-in-progress.
Frontiers in Spatial Humanities:
Lightning Presentations
We are pleased to host 40 rapid-fire, 2-minute demos of boundary-pushing projects in spatial humanities. The scholars presenting their work come from 27 different institutions, and were competitively selected to attend this prestigious program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of our Institute faculty will also offer brief glimpses of their work as part of a whirlwind tour of emerging work in humanities GIS.
While admission to the Institute itself is now closed, “Frontiers in Spatial Humanities” and the reception that follows are open to the public!
I’d like to thank the NEH for its generous funding of our training program, and the University of Virginia Library for supporting the Scholars’ Lab — as well as the “Frontiers” reception, to which you’re all invited!
Thursday, May 27th, 3:30-5:00pm
Harrison-Small Auditorium
We’re pleased to announce that the inaugural issue of our monthly newsletter is now available for download. The newsletter will highlight projects currently in progress in the Scholars’ Lab, report on professional activities of the Scholars’ Lab staff, and list monthly events. If you have suggestions for projects that you’d like to see highlighted in future newsletters, please email me at rag9b@virginia.edu.
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.
Ever wonder how folks in the Scholars’ Lab spend their day? Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the UVA Library and Joseph Gilbert, Head of the Scholars’ Lab, recently participated in the “Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities” project initiated by our friends at the University of Alberta. The “Day of DH” project encouraged scholars, administrators, students, and others who self-identify as “digital humanists” to blog about their day on March 18, 2009. You can read about Bethany’s day and Joseph’s day, as well as the experiences of a host of other participants.
A recent post by Ethan Gruber, a UVA Library staff member who has lately joined the Scholars’ Lab team, detailed his experiments with 3-dimensional modeling to re-contextualize Roman mosaics — right down to the interplay of light and shadow in ancient villas. Now Ethan’s work on creating a scholarly interface for the study of Greek and Roman coins has been profiled in UVA Today. This project came about through an internal UVA Library Innovation Grant and was undertaken in consultation with Art History professor John Dobbins, a 1994 IATH Fellow, whose Pompeii Forum project provided an early example for the utility of digital tools for archaeological inquiry. The rare coins were scanned by Andrew Curley of the Library’s Scholarly Resources Digitization Services.
Photo credit: Dan Addison. Read the full UVA Today press release here, or jump straight to the coins collection.
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.
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.
Schedule of Events:
Charlottesville Area GIS Users Lunch
with a talk by Dr. John Scrivani, Virginia Dept. of Forestry
12:00 – 1:30 in the Scholars’ Lab
GIS Day Cake Cutting
1:30 in the Scholars’ Lab
GIS Day Open House
with 10 different GIS user-groups and projects exhibiting!
1:30 – 2:45 in the Scholars’ Lab
Tour of “On the Map: The Seymour I. Schwartz Collection of North American Maps 1500-1800″
3:00 – 3:30 in the Small Special Collections Library
Speaker: David Rumsey
“Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies”
4:00 – 5:30 in the Harrison-Small Auditorium
Reception
5:30 – 6:30 in the Small Special Collections Library
A bright, sunny, open space like the Scholars’ Lab begs to be filled not only with students and faculty collaborating on digital projects, but also with art! We’re pleased to follow last semester’s successful showing of the watercolors of E. F. Chilton with this semester’s photography exhibit by our own Jean Bauer.
Jean is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UVA and a 2008-2009 Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Scholars’ Lab. Her exhibit, entitled “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Slices of the (Mostly) Natural World”, is on display in the Lab right now.
Staff from across the Library are offering learning opportunities through the Scholars’ Lab this week!
First, Keith Weimer and Chris Ruotolo will give a workshop on using syndication to stay on top of news sources and scholarly journals. Then, Chris Gist and Kelly Johnston will host the first meeting of an ongoing faculty/grad discussion group on geospatial technology for the humanities. Finally, Ethan Gruber will present an innovative interface he has created to the UVA Art Museum’s collection of Greek and Roman coins.
Ever wonder how folks in the Scholars’ Lab spend their day? Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the UVA Library and Joseph Gilbert, Head of the Scholars’ Lab, recently participated in the “
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.
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.
A bright, sunny, open space like the Scholars’ Lab begs to be filled not only with students and faculty collaborating on digital projects, but also with art! We’re pleased to follow last semester’s successful showing of the watercolors of E. F. Chilton with this semester’s photography exhibit by our own 
