Spring is nearly here, the sun is shining, and I realize how much I’ve fallen behind in keeping up the blog. This will be the first of a couple of blog posts about my recent Digital Humanities Excursions. In early February I traveled to the University of Virginia for a wonderfully welcoming and stimulating two days. I highly recommend the University of Virginia as a tourist destination on any Digital Humanities trip. The university is beautiful, as you’d expect from a school designed by Thomas Jefferson, the city is charming with many excellent restaurants and coffee places, and the digital humanists are doing fascinating and innovative work. Virginia is home to some classic digital humanities projects such as The Valley of Shadow and NINES.

I was invited to UVa by Bill Ferster, Senior Scientist at the Curry School of Education, who heads one of the cohorts comprising SHANTI: Sciences, Humanities, & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives. I spent last summer working with the geospatial tool he developed, VisualEyes, using it to draw maps, timelines and animated paths depicting the history of 18th century chemistry (more info here at the Chemical Heritage Foundation website ). I’ve been working on a manual for VisualEyes, drawing on my many-years-previous experience of manual-writing for such programs as dBase III and WordPerfect (remember them, anyone?). I must say it’s refreshing to be able to talk to the developer as I write the manual, and also to get feedback from other users. The SHANTI cohort is working on an eclectic mix of periods and problems, including map cataloging for the Tibetan Himalayan Library, visualization of ancient Roman baths, an American gravestones project, and a visualization of biocomplexity on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

In the afternoon I met another set of U Va digital humanities folks at the Scholar’s Lab at Alderman Library, directed by Beth Nowviskie. I gave a cooking-show demonstration of the software I’ve been using to create animated walk-throughs of the worlds of Edinburgh’s most famous serial killers, Burke and Hare. That is, I showed project development in each of its stages, finally pulling the completed animation out of the oven – er, playing it on my laptop (here’s the podcast). It was wonderful to be surrounded by so many knowledgeable people asking all the right questions.
My time to savor Charlottesville was cut short by Snowpocalypse, the huge blizzard that crashed into Virginia on February 5. I scurried northward just hours ahead of the storm front, but would be delighted to have an opportunity to return.

Here’s a cute Wordle cloud of the words used in Tweets of DH09: If I had thought of it, I would have mentioned @SJerseyDigital a few more times…

Soon, I’ll start day two’s sessions.