Mr. Jefferson ended his best-known sentence with “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The only thing missing was maps. In the Scholars’ Lab, we’re all about the spatial goodness. Inspired by Kansas State University’s Seven Deadly Sins maps, we set about converting the qualities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into…. More.
project launch: “Spatial Humanities!”
Over the past two years, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library has hosted an Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of “Spatial Humanities,” a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship: http://spatial.scholarslab.org/ This site responds to needs…. More.
Welcoming Jeremy Boggs!
We’re thrilled to announce that Jeremy Boggs will be joining the Scholars’ Lab and the staff of UVa Library’s Digital Research & Scholarship department this June, in the role of Humanities Design Architect. Jeremy comes to us from the wonderful Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, where he serves as…. More.
Speaker Series: Jeremy Boggs
Jeremy Boggs, last semester’s scholar-in-residence at the Scholars’ Lab, will give a talk at 2pm on Thursday, March 3. Boggs is Associate Director of Research at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, as well as a Ph.D. candidate in GMU’s Department of History. During his tenure at CHNM, where he…. More.
Scholars’ Lab and CHNM Partner on “Omeka + Neatline”
The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are pleased to announce a collaborative “Omeka + Neatline” initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress. The Omeka + Neatline project’s goal is to enable scholars, students, and library…. More.
Building Omeka Exhibits with Fedora Repository Content
Our NEH-funded Neatline project has inspired the Scholars’ Lab to develop or enhance several new Omeka plugins recently. (See our full list.) One of these is FedoraConnector, which is designed to enable administrators to attach Fedora datastreams (a digital object — whether image, XML like TEI or EAD, or video) to Omeka items. This is…. More.
Smarter Paper Maps
It’s a quiz. I’ll name the required skills, you name the profession. Go. Identifying map projections and coordinate systems Interpreting map scale Understanding techniques of cartographic relief Interpolating latitude & longitude Calculating geographic extent rectangles Too easy? Well the profession I’m describing is not Geographic Information Systems guru or Cartographer or Neogeographer. In fact, my…. More.
The Methodological Turn
Exactly how does one acquire the “tools of the trade” in digital humanities research? Thursday, September 16th 4pm in the Scholars’ Lab Ray Siemens from the University of Victoria is Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and President of the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI). Ray will talk about…. More.
Omeka, Solr, and TEI
One of the most vital tools that computers bestow upon the humanities scholar is the ability to rapidly sort and group data that are relevant to the scholar’s own research needs. A digital collection of several thousand artifacts is useful, but it is even more useful if, for example, the user can filter the results…. More.
Code Reviews and the Digital Humanities
The following was a response I made in an email exchange with Tom Elliot of the Pleiades Project and Bethany Nowviskie. Our conversation was prompted by Tom’s inquiry on planning, budgeting for, and conducting a code review as part of a grant-funded project. What follows is a slightly modified (and expanded) version of that email conversation.
Testing and code review is something that has been on my mind a lot lately as our shop has been shifting its focus from boutique, one-off projects, to building upon frameworks maintained by other organizations. As these code bases continue to grow, we need to ensure that subtle changes to the core functionality of the underlying systems do not propagate into bugs in our code. We also need a way to handle this situation quickly and efficiently when this does arise. This was especially reinforced by two recent projects our group undertook to migrate nearly decade-old software on to new servers.