© 2012 Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond » Boatwright Memorial Library / 28 Westhampton Way / University of Richmond, VA 23173
Scott Nesbit moderated the panel, “New Media and the Future of Civil War History” at the Gettysburg College conference, The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th.
January 15, 2013The Digital Scholarship Lab has been awarded a $750,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the digital atlas of American history project.
November 9, 2012Ed Ayers presented the keynote at the Annual Educause Conference in Denver entitled “Discovery in a Digital World”.
November 7, 2012Rob Nelson spoke at Educause 2012 on the opportunity and challenges for liberal arts colleges interested in engaging with the digital humanities as part of a panel on “Digital Scholarship at Liberal Arts Colleges.”
November 3, 2012Rob Nelson spoke on “Analyzing Nationalism and Other Slippery ‘Isms’” at the NEH-sponsored workshop Topic Modeling in Humanities Research at MITH.
July 20, 2012Rob Nelson made a presentation “Means and Ends in Civil War Nationalism and the Digital Humanities” at the Digital Humanities 2012 conference in Hamburg, Germany as part of a panel on topic modeling. A recording of the presentation is available online.
June 16, 2012Rob Nelson and Scott Nesbit each presented papers on a panel “Maps, Models, Machines: New Methods in Civil War History” at the Society of Civil War Historians Biennial Meeting in Lexington, Kentucky. Nelson’s paper was titled “Bullets and Ballots: The Instrumental Uses of Civil War Nationlism”; Nesbit’s (co-written with Grant DeLozier, Grant T. Floyd, John McIntosh, and May Yuan from the University of Oklahoma) “Mapping All the Troops.”
June 13, 2012The Chronicle of Higher Education has written an article on the DSL’s latest project, “Visualizing Emancipation.”
April 23, 2012The Richmond Times-Dispatch featured the Digital Scholarship Lab’s recent project, “Visualizing Emancipation” in today’s paper.
April 17, 2012Rob Nelson along with Christine Berkowitz from the University of Toronto Scarborough together made a presentation “History Engine 2.0: Researching Locally, Collaborating Globally” at the NITLE Symposium: Inventing the Future in Arlington, Virginia. They outlined future directions for the History Engine, including a revamp of the way the History Engine handles geography that will enable to project to grow beyond US history. The History Engine was also featured prominently in a session from History Engine contributors Kathryn Tomasek, Julian Chambliss, and Lloyd Benson.
April 12, 2012“Visualizing Emancipation” has launched! The project maps the end of slavery during the American Civil War using military correspondence, newspapers, and letters and diaries.
March 31, 2012Rob Nelson made a presentation “Killing, Dying, and Genre: Nationalism and the News in the Confederacy” as part of a panel on Confederate literature at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference in Nashville.
February 3, 2012Rob Nelson spoke on “Topic Modeling and the Shapes of Civil War Nationalism” at the Digital Media Symposium at the University of Wyoming.
February 1, 2012Edward L. Ayers and Rob Nelson each gave a talk at the launch of the Research Commons, home of the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC), at Emory University. Ed Ayers’s talk was on “Seeing Time,” Rob Nelson’s on “Topic Modeling and the Shapes of Civil War Nationalism.”
January 31, 2012An interview with Rob Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and the DSL’s former director Andrew Torget appeared in Southern Spaces.
January 6, 2012Rob and Scott presented papers as part of the panel “Hardtack and Software: Digital Approaches to the Civil War” at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, January 6, 2012.
January 5, 2012Rob Nelson was a panelist and workshop organizer for the kick-off event for DH Commons at the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Seattle.
December 21, 2011Nathan just had his article, ‘Aperture Science and the Caribbean Orange’ published on the videogame website Kotaku. The article looks at spatial representation in Portal and the architecture/photography of artist Gordon Matta-Clark.
November 29, 2011Nathan Altice recently delivered his paper “Tool-Assisted” at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. The paper discusses videogame speedruns on the Nintendo Entertainment System, console emulation, and the ‘plasticity’ of computer platforms.
November 11, 2011Rob Nelson was one of the panelists on in the inaugural session of the 2011-2012 NITLE Digital Scholarship Seminar Series. The panelists discussed “Digital Scholarship at Small Liberal Arts Colleges.”
November 4, 2011Rob Nelson presented a talk “Doing DH” at the Reston Campus of Northern Virginia Community College. The presentation explored the role of collaboration and the importance of funding in different digital humanities projects.
October 24, 2011Rob Nelson presented “Of Monsters and Men: Visualizing Sectionalism and Patriotism in the Civil War News” at the “Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities: Reunion Conference” at UCLA.
October 21, 2011The James River 3D visualization, created by Nate Ayers, will be playing at the Community Projects section at InLight.
October 5, 2011Rob Nelson presented his work using topic modeling to explore the contours and function of nationalism and patriotism in the Daily Dispatch and New York Times during the Civil War at MITH’s Digital Dialogues series. A recording of his presentation will be posted on the MITH site soon.
September 27, 2011In a podcast from Boatwright Library, former DSL student intern Amanda Kleintop discusses her senior thesis “Networks of Resistance: Black Virginians Remember Civil War Loyalties” and her use of social network analysis to analyze black Unionism.
September 16, 2011Scott Nesbit presented the Lab’s work on emancipation at the session, “Opportunities for Civil War Data 150 (CWD150)” at this year’s American Association of State and Local Historians meeting in Richmond, Virginia. CWD150 is a collaborative project using Linked Open Data to create connections between archives at the local, state, and federal levels and to help increase the discovery of these resources by researchers and the general public.
August 26, 2011“Hidden Patterns of the Civil War” received a positive and generous review in the October 2011 issue of Civil War Times. Susannah J. Ural suggests that “Hidden Patterns” “raises the bar for scholarly historical sites” and “ranks among the top three Civil War websites.”
July 19, 2011Southern Spaces publishes “Scales Intimate and Sprawling,” an essay by Scott Nesbit accompanied by an interactive map designed by Nathan Altice.
May 28, 2011An article by DSL Director Robert K. Nelson, “Of Monsters, Men—and Topic Modeling,” appeared in the New York Times Disunion blog series. The article uses the topic model developed for “Mining the Dispatch” to explore the strategies used in the Richmond Daily Dispatch to motivate southern men to join the Confederate army where they engaged in the morally challenging task of killing other men and where they risked losing their own lives.
April 28, 2011The Digital Scholarship Lab’s Hidden Patterns of the Civil War was featured on O’Reilly’s Radar April 27, 2011. Audrey Watters interviewed DSL Associate Director Scott Nesbit about the Lab’s participation in Civil War Data 150, a project linking data across institutions.
April 27, 2011DSL projects featured in an essay on the New York Times site.
April 10, 2011The Richmond Times Dispatch featured “Mining the Dispatch” in one of their articles commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
March 18, 2011Nathan Altice delivered the paper “Carts Tapes Discs Drives: Videogames as Material Objects” at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference, hosted at Penn State.
February 24, 2011Redlining Richmond has been updated to allow users to lay recent poverty data under the maps, revealing the disheartening persistence of poverty in some neighborhoods over almost a century.
February 17, 2011Voting America has been updated. The project now presents maps of recent congressional elections and the 2008 presidential election and expands the visualizations beyond the continental US.
January 9, 2011Robert K. Nelson delivered a paper “Spirit Politics: Antebellum Reform and the Shape of American Politics” at the American Historical Association annual meeting in Boston.
December 20, 2010This week we released Mapping Richmond’s Slave Market, a 3D model of the slave trading district in Richmond, Va. using the Google Earth interface. It comes out of a collaboration between the DSL, University of Virginia art historian Maurie McInnis, and the Valentine Richmond History Center. We presented a companion paper at the American Studies Association annual meeting in November 2011.
November 30, 2010We’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.
November 18, 2010Scott 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.
November 12, 2010The 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.
November 8, 2010The 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.
October 27, 2010DSL Associate Director Scott Nesbit presented research from Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008 at the Virginia State Capitol Tuesday, October 26, 2010. He presented research alongside Jeff Schapiro, political columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Rachel Sheldon, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Virginia. The evening meeting was convened by the Tredegar American Civil War Center.
October 2, 2010Robert K. Nelson and Scott Nesbit (the former in absentia) each delivered papers at the “Millennialism and Providentialism in the Era of the American Civil War” conference at Rice University in Houston. Nelson’s paper was entitled “Spirit Politics: Perfectionist Reform, Spiritualism, and the Attenuation of Antebellum Millennialism”; Nesbit’s “Millennial Spaces out of Slavery: Geography and Forgiveness in Reconstruction S.C.”
September 24, 2010The Digital Scholarship Lab’s Visualizing Emancipation project, which was recently designated a We the People project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was featured in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch. You can see preliminary work on the project on the DSL’s new Hidden Patterns of the Civil War site.
September 22, 2010Nathan Altice, a web programmer and PhD candidate in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Media, Art + Text program has joined the Digital Scholarship Lab. Nathan’s work will support the Tocqueville Seminars, a Mellon-funded program that introduces University of Richmond undergraduates and those at partner institutions to thinking about America in a global context.
August 11, 2010The NEH Office for Digital Humanities just announced that Digital Scholarship Lab, in conjunction with UR President Edward L. Ayers, has won an 18-month Digital Start-Up Grant for our project, “Landscapes of the American Past: Visualizing Emancipation.” President Ayers and DSL Associate Director Scott Nesbit will direct the project, which will be the first stage of an online atlas of American history. “Visualizing Emancipation,” a map of slavery’s end in the United States, will answer questions about when, where, and how emancipation emerged from the Civil War. In doing so, it will also address a question of increasing interest in the digital humanities: how can we produce maps that rely on and support open resources while at the same time creating effective and elegant visualizations that convey scholarly arguments? We will publish our findings online as a mapping application, in peer-reviewed essays, as freely accessible data and metadata, and in a white paper addressing the methodology of visualizing historical arguments.
June 20, 2010The Society for Civil War Historians held its biennial meeting in Richmond on June 17-20, which gave the DSL a chance to showcase some of its work. The plenary address, “Fighting and Freedom: United States Military Forces and the Geography of Emancipation” highlighted maps of emancipation that the DSL has produced over the last several months. We also held an open house showing a number of textual and mapping projects on the Civil War. Links to these projects will be coming soon.
April 17, 2010Robert Nelson and Scott Nesbit presented posters at Shockoe Bottom and the Maggie Walker House as part of the Future of Richmond’s Past’s Emancipation Day celebration, April 17, 2010. Read about the event here.
April 16, 2010DSL Associate Director Scott Nesbit presented a paper on the historical atlas and the discipline of history at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Washington DC on April 16, 2010. The abstract is here.
© 2012 Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond » Boatwright Memorial Library / 28 Westhampton Way / University of Richmond, VA 23173