Collegian Reporter
The National Endowment for the Humanities has just awarded Andrew Torget, director of the university's Digital Scholarship Lab, a $19,942 grant for research and an academic conference on data visualization in the humanities.
The one-year-old Digital Scholarship Lab uses data visualization to find new perspectives on massive quantities of information that would otherwise be impossible to untangle. The lab employs cutting-edge digital tools to analyze thousands of sources on a given topic, waiting for the statistical patterns to emerge.
"We want to create an environment for experimentation with these new digital tools," Torget said. "We want to try out ideas and technology in the humanities that have so far been used only in the hard sciences."
An example of the lab's use of data visualization is its Voting America project. One year in the making, the project compiles American voting behavior since the Founding Fathers, layering different sets of information on top of one another to analyze where they intersect. The data is then illustrated year-by-year on an interactive map of the United States, so that factors such as region, party strength, race and population can be correlated and observed. The result is an exploration of voting patterns and processes throughout American history.
"You have a much better idea of what's going on when you look at the data this way," Torget said. "It allows you to find out what's interesting, see where things cross. You can see the patterns emerge in a way you couldn't on an Excel sheet."
The sheer volume of the data being analyzed by the Digital Scholarship Lab's projects necessitates the recent grant. Alongside new research, the grant will fund a two-day workshop during the spring that will bring together researchers in different fields to discuss new methods of collecting and sharing such huge datasets.
"We want to build a system that allows information to be consolidated, formatted and shared," Torget said. "We want to allow researchers to communicate information with each other and get something out of it. This kind of research is something no single scholar can do by himself."
Another project currently in the works at the Digital Scholarship Lab is the Text Mining Project. This project uses tools to program computers to read relevant information in a huge pile of data, looking for when and how frequently specific words are used in regards to historical political movements and parties. Nearly 4,000 documents have been used so far, including newspapers, letters and pamphlets from the time period.
"The point is to see things you might not have been able to see without these tools," said Robert Nelson, associate director of the Digital Scholarship Lab.
The project uses the newest technology -- including open source software, repurposing tools and a history engine programmed from scratch -- to find and visualize the data.
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"'Lab' is a good name for this place," Nelson said. "We're experimenting here with research in its purest form. 'Lab' conveys that notion very well."
Torget said the lab was striving to make this new technology more visible and useful to Richmond students.
"I hope students will use this technology to explore the world they live in," Torget said. "We want to raise digital literacy and collaboration in the classroom."
Torget said he also wants the university to be on the forefront of these emerging technological developments, something the National Endowment for the Humanities grant will help provide.
"What we're working with here is pretty much brand new," Torget said. "This is how the next century of teaching is going to be. We're trying to make Richmond the center of it."
Contact reporter Michael Gaynor at michael.gaynor@richmond.edu
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