UVA Library Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities

Elizabeth will analyze the geospatial patterns of pipe use in early Native American settlements. She will pair her strong archaeological background with a suite of GIS technologies.

Scott will apply database and text mining methods to his study of colonial police forces in British Imperial South Africa to investigate the demographic qualities and personal lives of the men who composed these forces.

Matt is working on Biblical and other contemporaneous end-time accounts. He plans to apply text mining techniques to uncover previously unknown patterns and connections among early apocalyptic literature.

Wendy is interested in Asian-American indie rock culture and its depiction in new media. She will employ a series of web APIs for music and social networking sites in her research.

The Early American Foreign Service Database (EAFSD) will allow users to trace the creation and evolution of the U.S. Foreign Service from 1775 to 1825 by recording biographical information on all American diplomats, consuls, and special agents from that period and putting their lives in dialog with each other using a relational data structure that highlights the social, institutional, and epistolary networks they created on a day-to-day basis. The EAFSD is a crucial component of my dissertation, "Through A Glass Darkly: Creating the American Foreign Service, 1775-1825." The database will be written in MySQL with a Ruby on Rails interface and the code will be released under an open source license, allowing other scholars to build their own institutional or social networking databases.

Evangeline is a sign which, since Longfellow's poem in 1847, has taken on a life of its own and is now displayed throughout multiple landscapes, supports and discourses. My project aims to find, follow and map these signs to better understand the network of representations that Evangeline inspired.

My research asks how cosmology informs hierarchical relations in non-state societies. Focusing on the site of Paquimé in Chihuahua, Mexico, I use GIS to study intra-site distributions of artifacts and architectural features. I assess what the patterning of artifacts and architecture can tell us about prehistoric belief systems and social organization.

I am attempting to determine the authorship of the late-nineteenth century novel TELENY (a work sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde), through the use of statistically grounded text analysis techniques (also called "stylometric" analysis). The project engages the fields of machine learning and natural language processing, as well as posing the challenge of a quantitative definition of literary "style."

Dana employed a range of GIS tools in his study of the early Washington D.C. real estate market. By georectifying historical maps and plotting land value and other data, Dana was able to drawn new conclusions about the efficacy of L'Enfant's plan for the nation's capital.

In his study of modernist and post-modernist American poetry, Jim used Google Earth and other vernacular mapping tools to create a "mappemunde" of the way poets such as Charles Olson depicted place and how their own home locations influenced their work.

Bluegrass music in the Czech Republic -- there's a lot of it, and there's a lot of history and variety to the music-making. In addition to participant-observation and other person-level ethnographic work with folks who are part of the Czech bluegrass community, I broaden my work through web-based interactions. My online "Bluegrassová Mapa Ceské Republiky," which is in construction with help from the UVA library and the Bluegrassova Asociace Ceske Republiky will help widen the perspective of my dissertation, indicate the extent of bluegrass activity in Czech Republic to outsiders, and enable new local community and inter-community connections.

Dana relied her experience with XML and XSLT to create an online repository and exhibit of visual depictions of the enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia.

Mark Nevin studied the history public opinion polling during the years of Richard Nixon's presidency.