DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP LAB

About the DSL

The Digital Scholarship Lab develops innovative digital humanities projects that contribute to research and teaching at and beyond the University of Richmond. It seeks to reach a wide audience by developing projects that integrate thoughtful interpretation in the humanities and social sciences with innovations in new media.

Staff

Robert K. Nelson is the DSL’s director. He is an historian of nineteenth-century America. He holds a PhD in American studies from the College of William and Mary, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Social History and American Literature.

Scott Nesbit is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s associate director. He is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia with an interest in space and the nineteenth-century American South. His essays have appeared in the Journal for the Civil War Era and Southern Spaces.

Nathaniel Ayers is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s programmer analyst, serving as the head of the Lab’s technical work and providing technical assistance to faculty and students. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, Nathaniel has done programming and visualization work for the University of Virginia.

Claire Clement is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s Historical GIS Researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Medieval History at the University of Cambridge and has master’s degrees in medieval history and urban planning. Her dissertation research is on the economy, organization and gender relations in Syon Abbey, a late-medieval English double-monastery (housing both nuns and priests). Her additional research projects use GIS to investigate women’s travel and daily mobility in medieval England. At the DSL, she serves as the GIS specialist for a number of spatial history projects.

Edward L. Ayers is Senior Research Fellow at the DSL. He is the president and a professor of history at the University of Richmond. A scholar of the American South, he is the author of numerous books, including In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 and The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, and is co-editor of the Valley of the Shadow digital archive. He is the co-primary investigator on “Visualizing Emancipation.”