For a long list of complicated reasons, most practitioners of my discipline—political theory—tend to be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the integration of computer technology into their research and teaching. While some scholars cite the superfluity of computer technology to the discipline (excepting, of course, Microsoft Word), others argue that the introduction of…. More.
Mapping Regional Language Use
So for the thousandth (or so it seems) time I’ve gotten into this discussion with my friends from the East Coast and Midwest (I’m from Texas) about the correct way to refer to a sweet carbonated beverage, and I have finally got to thinking about ways to map locally spoken slang and jargon using GIS. …. More.
Mining and Mapping Apocalyptic Texts, Part 1
I have used computer technology to help my work in biblical interpretation for a while. I learned to do complex digital word searches with the Bibleworks software package early in my graduate career. When I started working at the Scholars’ Lab in the summer of 2006, I was introduced to digital humanities. I found these…. More.
Research Applications for 3D Models in Art History
These days, it is difficult to find a television documentary detailing an archaeological site that does not feature a representation in the form of a 3D model. Computer models make good teaching tools. A class of students may not have the opportunity to travel to Rome to view the Colosseum first-hand, and even if they…. More.
Peer Review for Visual Aids?
How frustrating is this: You sit down to take in some form of scholarly work (be it a book, an article, or a talk) and you find yourself increasingly confused with a bombardment of information from graphs and figures and maps which don’t make sense because they either have too much or too little information…. More.
Social Media and the Inauguration
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…. More.
Map “Vocabularies”
For the past year, I have been working on the Scholars’ Lab Geospatial Data Portal, the lab’s effort to make our GIS data sets readily available to UVA students, faculty, and staff via the world wide web by using a suite of open source, open standards-based applications. A particular aspect of this project that I…. More.
Biblical Statistics
The first topic that I chose for my dissertation in UVA’s Department of Religious Studies was the “School of Saint Paul.” I hoped to show the existence of a group of followers who surrounded Paul and engaged with him in the interpretation of the Old Testament. In order to do this, I decided to investigate…. More.
How to Measure Text?
…the words we join have been joined before, and continue to be joined daily. So writing is largely quotation, quotation newly energized, as a cyclotron augments the energies of common particles circulating. – Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era This month marks the beginning of the complicated process of starting up the Large Hadron Collider, the…. More.