CIRCA:Scholar's Lab

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Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

Scholar's Lab is based out of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. It was established in 2006 "as a site for innovation in the humanities and social sciences." [1] and specializes in geospatial humanities research. The Lab provides bookable rooms, equipment, digital resources, and consultation services to faculty and "advanced students in the humanities and social sciences" [2].

Contents

Resources

Within its physical space, Scholar's Lab offers a variety of resources to its users. Staff provide consultative assistance in the areas of project management, electronic text encoding and its qualitative analysis, and the digitization of texts and images.[3] The space also includes high-end computers with high resolution monitors for digital research. These computers are equipped with specialized software of relevance to digital humanities scholars.

These tools include:

For a full list of tools and resources available at Scholar's Lab, visit the What is Scholar's Lab page.

Workshop Series

Scholar's Lab provides significant support to its local users through hands-on workshops in its areas of specialty. In the Fall of 2011, Scholar's Lab is offering workshops in statistics (specifically in SAS, SPSS, and R, among others) and GIS (ie. making maps using ArcGIS, Google Fusion Tables, or GeoCommons).


Projects

Collective Biographies of Women

An image of Elizabeth I of England from the Collective Biographies of Women project.

The Mind is a Metaphor

Geospatial Data Portal

The Scholar's Lab Geospatial Data Portal is a repository created by Scholar's Lab of GIS data sets. Users can search for terms within a specified geographical locale, and can view the returned data sets either within their browser or in Google Earth. According to the project page, "[t]he Geospatial Data Portal is an application for searching and displaying spatial metadata records from a GeoNetwork catalog. Geospatial Data Portal is written in Ruby and is available in both the Sinatra and Ruby on Rails frameworks."

The Geospatial Data Portal appears to be in beta at this time, as the help page states that "Scholar's Lab cannot guarantee stability at this time."

Significance to the Digital Humanities

The Scholar's Lab is of particular significance to the digital humanities due to its focus on geospatial information and data, thus serving as a hub of activity in this research area. Scholar's Lab employs two GIS specialists, both of whom are certified GIS specialists. Additionally, the Lab created and supports the Geospatial Data Portal, a free tool for researchers around the world exploring spatial metadata.

NEH institute for GIS scholarship

Scholar's Lab's influence in the area of GIS scholarship in the humanities is evidenced by the fact that it hosted an NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship in late 2009 and early 2010. This institute had wide appeal due to its three-track approach to the topic:

  • Track 1 - Stewardship - focusing on geospatial content and access, targeted towards library, museums, and GIS professionals
  • Track 2 - Software - focusing on "[s]patially enabling web projects and building service-oriented GIS infrastructure"[4], target towards web developers, sysadmins, and other IT scholars and professionals
  • Track 3 - Scholarship - focusing on how "space and place" as concepts in digital humanities research, targeted towards current digital humanities scholars and graduate students.

Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities

Scholar's Lab furthers the progress of the digital humanities as a whole by providing financial support to UVa researchers working on digital humanities projects through its Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities program. Successful applicants to the program "receive $5,000 at the beginning of the fall semester and, after demonstrating progress toward stated goals, $5,000 at the beginning of the spring semester."[5]

Praxis Program

In recognition of the variety of skills needed by graduates in order to achieve success in the area of digital humanities research, Scholar's Lab is experimenting with a new pedagogical process entitled The Praxis Program. It aims to create "humanities scholars who are as comfortable writing code as they are managing teams and budgets." [6]

References

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