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Curriculum

Final syllabi are being designed in collaboration with Institute faculty, and will be adjusted to meet the needs, skill levels, and expressed interests of selected participants. In the meantime, here's a rough sketch of the plan. In each track, continental breakfasts, box lunches, and one working dinner in UVa's Colonnade Club or Rotunda will be provided. Track 1 and 2 participants will have frequent opportunities to meet and exchange ideas. In each round, the Scholars' Lab will also host an optional mapping party. With the help of GPS devices, institute attendees can explore, record, and represent Thomas Jefferson's historic Academical Village in Open Street Map.

Tracks 1 & 2: Stewardship and Software

Julie Sweetkind-Singer, MLIS, Head Librarian and GIS & Map Librarian at Stanford University’s Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collection, will serve as facilitator for the Stewardship track of Round 1, with the assistance of Dr. Bethany Nowviskie and Scholars’ Lab GIS Specialist Kelly Johnston, MS GIS. Guest speakers include: Madelyn Wessel, Esq., Associate General Counsel, UVA, Dr. Joshua Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy at the New York Public Library, and Dr. Diana Sinton, Director of Spatial Curriculum and Research, University of Redlands.

The Technology track of Round 1 will be coordinated by Joseph Gilbert, with instruction by Scholars’ Lab staff, including: GIS Specialist Christopher Gist, MS; User Support Programmer Adam Soroka (leader of a pre-conference workshop on the Scholars’ Lab approach to GIS infrastructure at the 2009 Code4Lib conference in Providence, RI); Scholars’ Lab Digital Humanities Specialist Wayne Graham, MA; and UVA Library Chief Systems Architect Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler, MLIS. Guest speakers include: Shekhar Krishnan, of MIT and Mumbai Free Map project; Schuyler Erle of OpenLayers, author of the O’Reilly books Map Hacks and Google Maps Hacks; Andrew Turner of Mapufacture, author of An Introduction to Neogeography and Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web, and Sean Gillies of the Pleiades Project at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU.

Track 3: Scholarship

Anne Kelly Knowles, M.Sc., Ph.D., of Middlebury College, author of numerous books, articles, and textbooks on GIS applications for humanities scholarship, will facilitate Round 2 together with Dr. Bethany Nowviskie. Guest speakers include: Dr. Todd Presner of UCLA and the HyperCities project; Dr. David Germano of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (UVA), Dr. Benjamin Ray of the Salem Witch Trials Archive (UVA), Matt Knutzen, Assistant Chief of the Maps Division at New York Public Library, and Martyn Jessop of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College, London.

The second round of the Institute is geared toward humanities faculty members, graduate students, and other scholars. An opening discussion will identify central questions facing the studies of space and place in the digital humanities. Martyn Jessop’s 2008 article on inhibiting factors in humanities GIS will serve as a guide, and Jessop will present his work. The first afternoon session will allow scholars to become familiar with the everyday tools of the trade for spatial scholarship. Core GIS concepts, interactive maps and globes, and principles of web mashup applications—including web services and open data—will be covered in depth by Scholars’ Lab staff to provide participants with the underlying technical understanding required to formulate and manage complex scholarly projects incorporating these tools.

Those general technological principles will be brought to bear on humanities studies during the second day as scholars examine digital projects, historical map content, and metadata standards that make innovative inquiries using spatial tools in humanities disciplines possible. Tools such as Benjamin Ray’s temporal map of Salem witch trial accusations (which Ray will present to the group), the New York Public Library’s Map Rectifier, IATH’s Virtual Rome exhibit, Todd Presner’s HyperCities project, and content collections such as David Rumsey’s online map library, with its Google Earth and Second Life integration, will serve as examples. After the hands-on experience of the morning session, we will invite scholars to engage critically with places that are difficult if not impossible to map with precision. Ambiguous or conflicting place names, liminal spaces, subjective or politically-inflected views of space, and imaginary places are often encountered in humanities studies and present a unique challenge to the science-based approaches of online spatial tools. HyperBerlin (presented by Todd Presner), the Open Street Map Project and the Tibetan-Himalayan Places Dictionary (presented earlier in the day by David Germano, but now described technically by Bess Sadler) will offer guidance. Scholars will attempt to go further in the session with a hands-on exercise (led by Bethany Nowviskie and inspired by her work with Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker at UVA's SpecLab) to map the seemingly unmappable.

Studies of place are tied intimately to considerations of time and history. On Day 3, Martyn Jessop and Joseph Gilbert will examine solutions for visualizing maps and spatial information over time with tools such as SIMILE’s Timeline and the TimeMap project. In the afternoon, participants will dissect a complex example application involving space and time in the stories, letters, and life of a 20th century author. The Scholars’ Lab has created a prototype application that allows users to examine the ways H.P. Lovecraft’s longtime home of Providence, RI influenced his writing. Users can see the changing face of Providence through the years and how Lovecraft’s stories and correspondence interpret that spatial field. Scholars will leave the session with the ability to alter this application to represent an author and place of their choosing.

The second session of the Institute concludes with a reflection on possibilities for deeper, formal engagement with space, place, and time in the digital humanities. Participants will devise or workshop concrete goals for current projects that leverage the tools and methodologies explored in the Institute.

Questions? Contact us.