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.

We’re crowd-sourcing the keynote to the final round of the Scholars’ Lab/NEH 2009-2010 Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. With all of these fantastic attendees on hand — not to mention the Institute faculty — how could we let the opportunity slip by?

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

For more information about the SLab and our NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, please visit:
http://lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/geospatial/

Scholars’ Lab News for April 2010 (PDF version)

Scholars’ Lab News April 2010 (text-only version)

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.

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.

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.

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

Image from the David Rumsey Map Collection

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.

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.

Check our calendar for dates and times!

With projects in social networking, geospatial analysis, and cultural mapping, these three doctoral candidates — Jean Bauer of the History Department, Pierre Dairon of the French Department, and Abigail Holeman of the Anthropology Department — are applying exciting new methods to the study of early American history, French literature, and Mesoamerican cosmology. Each will speak briefly about his or her research, and a free lunch will be served.

The Scholars’ Lab was established two short years ago at UVA Library as a site for innovation in the humanities and social sciences. The idea was to combine the resources and expertise of the Library’s successful Electronic Text (Etext) and Geospatial and Statistical Data (GeoStat) centers with that of UVA’s Research Computing Support Group in a physical space that promotes collaboration and experimentation. Now we’re extending the conversations that happen in our offices and in the SLab to a wider forum.

The past two years have seen amazing work by our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and by scholars from a variety of disciplines and fields who work in collaboration with our on-site experts. Over the coming months, we’ll be inviting our Fellows, grad student consultants, Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, visiting scholars, and UVA collaborators to share this blog and make it their own. The substantive (and CC-licensed) posts you’ll find here will be vetted to ensure that they represent sound scholarship and are squarely on-topic. We’ll also use this space to share announcements about SLab events and links to interesting and evocative uses of technology in the humanities and social sciences.

We invite you to comment and engage with us here!