Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship

FAIN: HT-50015-09

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Bethany Nowviskie (Project Director: February 2009 to February 2012)

The creation of two institutes, aimed at scholars, librarians, museum officials, and advanced graduate students, to explore how geospatial technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used for teaching, learning, and research in the humanities.

The Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library requests $162,457 from NEH to host two rounds of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. The first four-day event would invite 20 competitively selected library, museum, and digital humanities center professionals to shape policy and begin building the technical capacity of the institutions they represent, to support boundary-pushing geospatial scholarship. Ongoing work in implementing a standards-based, open source infrastructure for discovery, delivery, and manipulation of geospatial data would be supported through an online clearinghouse and open-access community to be maintained long-term by the Scholars' Lab. The second Institute would invite 20 humanities scholars and advanced graduate students to train with and critique the open source and standards-based GIS tools and geospatial approaches to humanities scholarship being developed by the University of Virginia Library.