Scholars' Lab

In our work on Neatline, we have made a deliberate choice to start by constraining ourselves to map-sources that are quickly and easily provided through WMS. This leaves out (for now) two popular sources of map imagery; Google Maps and Open Street Map. I’m going to explain why we made that choice, and why, when we do come to make these sources usable with Neatline, we will do so with great care and with an eye to scholarly method. » Read the rest of this entry «

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.

[UPDATE: video for the "Frontiers" event is now available!]

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/

Have you ever wondered what would happen to your map of points if while converting your coordinates from latitude/longitude in degrees, minutes, seconds (DMS) to decimal degrees (DD) you messed up the math?  Ever seen a weird tartan-like plaid pattern emerge on your map from points that were suppose to be uniformly spread out over the known extent?  Or wonder why coordinates are much more commonly stored as decimal degrees by computer GIS applications instead of the degrees-minutes-seconds most of us learn growing up?  If so, this blog entry from the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is for you! » Read the rest of this entry «

In the Scholars’ Lab we are working with remarkably detailed datasets showing changes to US political boundaries over time.  We’ve all been fascinated with visualizations where the familiar outlines of the US states emerge from thousands of boundary changes to their underlying counties over the last few hundred years.  Did you know Virginia once spanned from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River?

We’re developing a new web-based tool for visualizing these historic boundary changes and it’s nearly ready for prime time.  We’ll announce the beta release here soon.

So with the knowledge that US state boundaries have already been subject to drastic change over time, let’s have some fun with geographic information systems to visualize drastic mathematically-induced changes to those familiar US state boundaries.

For our experiment, let’s keep all our current state capital cities right where they are since they are laden with the necessary infrastructure of government.  But we’ll move the state boundary lines Voronoi-style so anywhere you travel in each of our new states you’ll be closer to the state capital than any other state capital.  In other words, when you’re standing anywhere inside our newly outlined Virginia, you will always be closer to the Virginia state capital, Richmond, than any other state capital.  That seems very efficient.  Let’s have a look.

Here’s that familiar grade-school wall map of the lower 48 US states and their capital cities.   Now let’s tweak the map with GIS software to reconfigure the states, Voronoi-style.

Wow, what a difference Voronoi makes.

Let’s measure just how much the states have changed in our new layout.   In absolute terms, Utah and New Mexico make the biggest land grabs while Texas and California lose the most real estate.  But as a percentage of their current area, Rhode Island is the big winner ballooning in size by over 240% while Massachusetts shrinks 60%.

To visualize the state-by-state changes, Todd Burks from neighboring Clemons Library overlayed the two maps.

Intrigued?  Read more about Voronoi and Thiessen polygon GIS techniques.

The 1907 Massie Map of Albemarle Co., VA

While going through our archives of scanned maps, we recently ran across a copy of Frank A. Massie’s 1907 “A new and historical map of Albemarle County, Virginia” [Special Collections, University of Virginia Library], commonly referred to as the Massie map, which contains a wealth of detailed historical information for the county in which the University of Virginia sits.

» Read the rest of this entry «

In the Scholars’ Lab we recently worked with a researcher whose study areas focused on several groups of US counties. Of interest was the distance from every county within a group to every other county in that same group. We used geographic information systems (GIS) software to calculate these distances.

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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.

At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media.  Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture. » Read the rest of this entry «

Following up on my introduction to using 3D models to recreate archaeological sites and perform meaningful academic analysis on simulated virtual environments, I will discuss in further detail my current project concerning the recreation of the House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria, the port city of Roman Antioch.

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