Projects

Salem Witch Trials

The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records, including court records, contemporary books, and record books.

The Documentary Archive is created under the supervision of Professor Benjamin C. Ray, University of Virginia. The Transcription project is supervised by Professor Bernard Rosenthal, University of Binghamton. Together with a team of scholars, Professor Rosenthal is undertaking a new transcription of the original court records, titled Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Visit the Salem Witch Trials site.

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For Better for Verse

A collaboration with UVA English professor Herbert Tucker, For Better for Verse tests users’ understanding of prosody, or poetic meter in English-language poetry. In the over 40 included poems, users can mark syllable stress, foot divisions, and even check answers. Intended primarily for teaching purposes, For Better for Verse allows students to explore poems of varying difficulty and complexity.

The application embeds a core JSP, XSLT, and Javascript application within a WordPress installation. The poems are encoded using the TEI P5 standards.

Visit the For Better for Verse site.

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The Mind is a Metaphor

The Mind is a Metaphor site is a collaboration with Brad Pasanek. The project collects “metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century.”

The project took an existing database that was being manually edited through phpMyAdmin and reimagining it as a Ruby on Rails application with the primary search and browsing interfaces being provided through Solr and its faceting interface. By providing a faceted interface for the metaphors, researchers can quickly narrow search categories to quickly find examples of metaphors in specific literary periods, metaphor categories, genres, nationalities, political leanings of authors, religious views, as well as the gender of the writer.

Visit The Mind is a Metaphor site.

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Collective Biographies
of Women

Alison Booth’s “Collective Biographies of Women” began as a simple electronic text which, in collaboration with the Scholars’ Lab, blossomed into a rich instrument for the study of prosopography. Professor Booth has been selected as an IATH Associate Fellow on the merit of this work.

Visit the Collective Biographies of Women project.

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Project Blacklight

A free and open source ruby-on-rails based library discovery interface, recently highlighted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Explore the UVa implementation.
Read more about Project Blacklight.

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The UVa Art Museum Numismatic Collection

The The University of Virginia Art Museum Numismatic Collection features nearly 600 coins of Greek and Roman origin. The coins were generally acquired in small lots that were purchased or donated from 1987-2001, but larger groups of coins belonging to English hoards were also acquired, including 51 from the Normanby Hoard and 302 from the Oliver’s Orchard Hoards. About 450 of the total number of coins are from the Roman Republic or Empire, providing a broad sample of coins from the late 3rd century B.C. to the late 3rd century A.D., particularly from the Crisis of the Third Century–including more than 100 coins from the breakaway Gallic Empire of A.D. 260-274.

Visit The University of Virginia Art Museum Numismatic Collection site.

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Latvian Dainas
Electronic Edition

The Latvian Dainas site is an electronic edition of the 12 volumes of Latviešu tautas dziesmas, edited by Arveds Švābe, Kārlis Straubergs, and Edīte Hauzenberga-Šturma, published by Imanta, Copenhagen, 1952-1956. The editor of the electronic text is Prof. Maruta Lietiņa Ray.

Visit the Latvian Dainas site.

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EADitor

EADitor is an XForms framework for the creation and editing of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using Orbeon, an enterprise-level XForms Java application, which runs in Apache Tomcat.

Get the code for EADitor.

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Faulkner at Virginia:
An Audio Archive

Professor Stephen Railton, with assistance from the Scholars' Lab and SHANTI, created the Faulkner at Virginia archive. Here you can listen in on William Faulkner’s sessions with audiences at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, during his two terms as UVA’s first Writer-in-Residence.

Visit The Faulkner at Virginia archive.

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THL Place Dictionary

The “Places Portal” of the Tibetan and Himalayan Library stems from a long collaboration between the Scholars’ Lab and THL staff. “Places,” which includes a complex gazetteer, is the area of THL where spatial and geographical data is archived and presented, as well as where rich studies of specific places are published.

Visit the THL Place Dictionary.

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Raven

Raven is a flexible framework for indexing, searching and displaying various data formats. In its preliminary stages, Raven has shown to work with TEI, EAD and VRA as well as other, non-XML formats. The framework aims to provide out of the box “profiles” for different data formats. Profiles will include indexing strategies, view templates and user interface widgets for working with the data in meaningful ways. The modern software stack is all open source. Ruby on Rails provides the application framework while Solr provides the search engine and data store.

Get the code for Raven.

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Solrmarc

A Java-based program for indexing MARC records into Solr indexes. This is the main indexing mechanism for both the Blacklight and Vufind projects.

Read more about the Solrmarc project.

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