Projects
The Digital Scholarship Lab works to develop projects that seize upon the opportunities afforded by visualization, computation, and social computing to shed new light on questions in the social sciences and the humanities. Visualization has been to date a particular emphasis in the DSL's projects, many of which seek to represent historical processes—whether they be social, political, cultural, intellectual, etc.—as they spread out across both time and space.
History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education and Research
The History Engine is a project that gives students the opportunity to practice the craft of history by researching, writing, and publishing what we call "episodes"—concise micro-histories about small moments in American history. Collected together on the History Engine site, the result is an ever-growing history archive that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history. The History Engine is currently being used in classrooms a number of universities and colleges throughout the country.
Redlining Richmond
During the late 1930s the Home Owner's Loan Corporation, a New Deal Agency, amassed data about neighborhoods in cities around the country and graded the "residential security" of those neighborhoods. For each of these cities they produced a map that graphically displayed their rating of the security of mortgages in those neighborhoods. "Redlining Richmond" presents maps and lists of all of the assessment data collected for Richmond, Virginia, and explores how race and racism shaped the HOLC's assessments of the city's neighborhoods and the residential security map it produced for Virginia's capital.
Voting America: United States Politics, 1840–2008
Voting America examines the evolution of presidential politics in the United States across the span of American history. The project offers a wide spectrum of cinematic and interactive visualizations of how Americans voted at the county level in presidential elections from the beginning of the modern party system through the modern day. Here you can see historical developments in American voting patterns as they moved across the landscape of the United States during the past 164 years from a variety of perspectives, such as presidential election voting by county, counties won in popular vote, third-party voting, margins of victory etc.
TextMapping
The Digital Scholarship Lab is beginning to experiment with text mining, using statistical analysis and visualization to uncover meaning in large bodies of documents. Initial work has concentrated on two collections of nineteenth-century American newspapers: the run of Richmond's Daily Dispatch during the Civil War and newspapers, letters, and diaries from the Valley of the Shadow project. The TextMapping site currently focuses on the latter collection.