Category: geospatial

space and place in the digital humanities

open call: NEH/Scholars’ Lab GIS institute

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

This is a follow-up to my previous post, to say that the Scholars’ Lab has now issued an open call for applicants to its NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. We’ll run three tracks of the Institute, with the first two (Stewardship and Software) happening concurrently this year, from November 15th to 18th (which happens to be GIS Day). The third track (Scholarship) will be held May 25th-28th, 2010. NEH will generously cover travel, lodging, and working meals for ten attendees in each of the first two tracks and twenty attendees in the third track. We’ve even built in a special funding for graduate student participants in track 3.

Because one goal of the Institute is to build the capacity of participating institutions (from the policy-and-collections-building side to the infrastructure-and-interfaces side to some serious scholars-bootstrapping-each-other goodness!), we encourage you to collaborate with your colleagues in IT, the library, your local (digital?) humanities center, and interested academic departments. We’ll be giving careful attention to applications from institutional “teams” who can be represented in each track — but individual applicants are encouraged, too.

The deadline for consideration for tracks 1 and 2 is September 1st. Track 3’s deadline is the 1st of December. Read all about the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, check out our amazing faculty, and apply at our website.

institute for enabling geospatial scholarship

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

Last year, the UVA Scholars’ Lab hosted a local, semester-long faculty and grad student seminar on geospatial technologies in the humanities.  We used, as a jumping-off point, Martyn Jessop’s assessment of factors contributing to a surprising “inhibition” of the use of digitized maps and GIS among humanists. That GIS, an important tool for scholarly engagement with space and place across the disciplines, has been slow to penetrate the digital humanities — a population generally receptive to new practices and technologies — begs a discussion of issues at once historical and methodological, institutional and pragmatic. The seventh annual Scholarly Communication Institute, to be held at UVA Library in a couple of weeks, will take this issue up in a concentrated way, as we focus on spatial technologies and tools: the institutional, methodological, and interpretive aspects of GIS in the context of scholarly communication.

The “inhibition” question demands serious engagement by scholars, programmers, librarians, and advocates for shared data and transparent, flexible, open services. To be effective, this engagement must come at many levels simultaneously: we must work to build core infrastructure to support GIS and leverage the strengths of (primarily government and academic) data providers; we must carefully analyze past successes as well as failures in the digital humanities in order to move forward with more robustly-imagined scholarly projects; and we must interrogate both a toolset that has evolved to suit scientific inquiry (that is, positivist models of physical behavior and dense, detailed, precisely-defined data sets, generally synchronic) and our own inherited systems for interpreting the human record within a spatial field. Above all – because place and space, whether specifically geo-referenced or wholly conceptual, are common denominators in humanistic disciplines – we must make a concerted effort at supporting and understanding what it is that we do, when we “do GIS.”

Today, I’m proud to announce that the Scholars’ Lab has been funded by the NEH to host three tracks of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of “Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.”

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