The Scholars' Lab

We're the UVA Library's community lab for the practice of experimental scholarship in all fields, informed by digital humanities, spatial technologies, & cultural heritage thinking. We provide training, consultations, and collaboration on the latest software, equipment, and methods for digital research, scholarship, and teaching.

Through our Digital Humanities Center, we offer mentoring, collaboration, and safe & supportive community for anyone curious about learning to push disciplinary and methodological boundaries through new approaches. We’re foremost a space for learning together—about anything—by trying stuff.

Our Staff

Our Teaching Philosophy

Makerspace

3D modeling and printing, physical computing, electronics, textiles, laser cutting, crafting.

Spatial Tech

GIS, 3D modeling, laser scanning, aerial drones, photogrammetry, virtual and augmented reality.

Research + Development

Project management, web design and development, programming pedagogy, digital collections & exhibitions, data management, text analysis.

Consultations

Our strengths in digital humanities, spatial technology, and humanities-informed critical making inform all our consultations for experimental scholarly projects. The Scholars' Lab's international reputation, and external leadership and service, mean we can connect you effectively to external communities, opportunities, and trends.

Graduate Fellowships

Digital Humanities Fellowship

Sixth-year funding for a dissertation-level research project of your own design, with regular support from staff on scoping and implementation.

Praxis Program

Introduction to DH for a group of early-career PhD students, which includes collaborative projects and activities and experience with a broad range of approaches to DH praxis and pedagogy

Get in Touch!

Visit the Scholars' Lab Website or email [email protected] to set up a time to talk with us about your work and interests!

Reconstructing St. Emma Military Academy

Jennifer Saunders' fellowship project was a 3D digital reconstruction of the blacktop of St. Emma Military Academy in Powhatan, VA circa 1965. Though hundreds of students made memories on the grounds of this Black Catholic military boarding school between 1895 and 1972, most of its buildings were demolished soon after the school closed. This project acknowledged the value of students' experiences by restoring the landscape in an accessible, interactive way, and exploring digital methods as an element of the historic preservation toolkit.

Stylistic Variation In Online Political Discourse

Michelle Morgenstern's (Anthropology) dissertation explored the ethical lives of young people who credit the social media platform, Tumblr, with shaping their beliefs about what it means to be and do good in the world. It integrated ethnography with large-scale text analytics to investigate how these young people come to take up and enact new political and moral commitments through creative linguistic practices.

Virtual Garden Dining in Pompeii

Janet Dunkelbarger's project explored the physical, visual, and phenomenological aspects of dining outdoors in the gardens of Pompeii in the 1st century AD. Using virtual reality to rebuild several of Pompeii’s Garden Dining Spaces, the 3D reconstructions created an integrated and immersive experience for exploring the spaces and better understand their use and significance to the people of the ancient city.

Jennifer Foy, Graduate Fellow in Digital Humanities

Jennifer Foy is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the axes of stigma and sympathy in eighteenth century literature and culture, and her dissertation is titled ‘Mapping Sympathy: Sensibility, Stigma, and Space in the Long Eighteenth Century."

Gertrude Stein’s Grammars

Jordan Buysse's (English) DH fellowship research applied recent tools and packages for natural language processing to Gertrude Stein’s 1931 book How to Write. His particular focus was grammar, a subject that fascinated Stein and animated some of her most inventive and challenging prose. While many text analytic approaches to literature center individual words as the primary unit of analysis, Stein’s proud self-identification as a “grammarian” demands an approach honed in on the connections between words at the clause and sentence level. Apart from the specific research case of Stein, the project also considered some practical ways that researchers can search for, sift through, and otherwise explore phrase-level units of language.

Scholars' Lab research co-conspirators: IATH

Since 1992, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities has collaborated with humanities researchers on a remarkable range of transformative, original research projects during selective fellowships. Faculty Resident and Associate Fellowship programs support UVA faculty doing humanities research, especially larger projects needing applications development and grant planning.