Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at UVA

Bethany Nowviskie is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute.

She reports on her blog that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has funded the school’s Scholars’ Lab “to host three tracks of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of “Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.”” The institute will enable projects that support institutions to provide access to geospatial technology for the humanities. In the end, the goal is a clearinghouse is to: “offer technical bootstrapping for libraries and museums new to sophisticated GIS support via Web services frameworks, but also to provide differing scholarly perspectives on GIS for the humanities, from within the coherent narrative of a multi-institutional effort (which we hope this Institute will foster) to build modern infrastructure, support innovative digital projects, and open up dialogue about the causes and conditions of the digital humanities community’s uncharacteristic inhibition toward GIS.” From what I gather the apps will be open source.

You’ll recognize some names of geospatial folks on the advisory board.

This sounds very cool.

via Twitter