We’ve been working with Maurie McInnis, an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, on a three dimensional reconstruction of the Richmond slave trading district. This work is based in large part on McInnis’s new book, Visualizing the Southern Slave Trade, currently at press with the University of Chicago, and is being built using Sketch-up for the Google Earth interface. Scott Nesbit, Robert Nelson, and Maurie McInnis have written a paper on the 3D reconstruction for a panel on Slavery, Technology, and Representation at this year’s American Studies Association annual meeting in San Antonio. Look for the paper and the 3D model soon on our Hidden Patterns of the Civil War site.

Scott Nesbit, Robert K. Nelson, and Maurie McInnis (the latter two in absentia) delivered a paper “Visualizing the Southern Slave Trade” at the American Studies Association annual meeting in San Antonio.

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) hosted a packed digital scholarship seminar today, featuring three projects that engage a broad range of faculty and students at liberal arts institutions, including USC’s Sophie project, UCLA’s Hypercities, and our own History Engine. You can read about the NITLE Digital Seminar Series here.

The Digital Scholarship Lab has been partnering with a new project, Civil War Data 150, that thinks about the possibilities opened up for all kinds of research by semantic data-sharing over the web. This partnership and the CWD150 project was just highlighted in the technology blog, ReadWriteWeb.