The Scholars’ Lab is the UVA Library’s lab for the practice of experimental scholarship in all disciplines, informed by digital humanities, spatial technologies, scholarly making, and cultural heritage approaches.
We offer mentoring, collaboration, and a supportive community experience for anyone curious about learning to push disciplinary and methodological boundaries through digital approaches. We’re foremost a space for learning together—about anything—by trying stuff. Think of us as friends and colleagues who can help you teach yourself new ways of approaching your interests.
We are an internationally recognized scholarly team, with strengths including:
The SLab also hosts community events (like workshops and a popular lecture series) in our library spaces, and helps to train and mentor the next generation of digital humanities scholar-practitioners through our Graduate Fellowships in Digital Humanities and innovative Praxis Program.
We capture the Scholars’ Lab’s ethos of collaborative, thoughtful project development and community support in our team-authored charter.
You are invited to stop by the Scholars' Lab anytime; our staff are in Shannon 415. We host Open Office Hours every Wednesday from 10:00-11:30 a.m. throughout the Fall and Spring semesters. You are also welcome to email with questions or to schedule an appointment.
For general inquiries, write to scholarslab@virginia.edu.
For questions about spatial technologies and cultural heritage informatics, contact spatial@virginia.edu.
For GIS-specific questions, contact uvagis@virginia.edu.
For inquiries about our Makerspace, write to slabmakerspace@virginia.edu.
We are also on Twitter @scholarslab.
1) Consults: As a UVA Library unit, we follow the model of reference librarian consultations and welcome everyone in the UVA community to meet with us for a brief consultation session around experimental methods. During your consult, we can help you:
2) Collaboration: As scholars from a variety of disciplines, we also have some availability for more in-depth research or pedagogical collaborations with other UVA folks. Our decisions about longer-term research collaboration are based on the resources, skills, and interests/mission of all parties. We would start with a consult, and those may lead to ongoing instruction, additional consultations, or long-term collaborations.
3) Community Lab: In addition to the consultations and collaborations stated above, much of our time for in-depth work is spent on intentional community design…
…and on strengthening existing cutting-edge staff expertise:
We strongly believe investment in the direct practice of experimental methods is the key to transformative experiences for individual scholars, as well as the best leveraging of our resources on behalf of UVA. Therefore, we are committed to teaching, and building things with people (e.g. as peer scholars, and co-PIs on grant proposals) rather than solely for people.
Although we bring library, digital humanities, spatial technologies, & cultural heritage skills to almost everything we work on, we are open and welcoming to folks in any discipline working in any field, and we regularly collaborate in almost every area on Grounds. An inexhaustive list of who we’ve worked with on Grounds includes folks from Biology, Environmental Science, Nursing, Media Studies, Music, Religious Studies, Spanish, Slavic, German, French, Classics, English, History, Law, Art History, Architecture, and GIS/spatial tech support across Grounds.
Our Hours & Spaces page has more information on our physical spaces as well as maps helping you navigate to us.
We’re in Shannon Library, which is on UVA’s Central Grounds: just west of the Rotunda and chapel, and just east of Nameless Field and those tennis courts. We’re the west wing of Shannon’s fourth (main) floor, the same floor you enter on. Turn left and walk past Greenberry’s coffee shop and a water fountain to find the Scholars’ Lab staff offices, then turn right to find our Common Area (including Makerspace and Open Office Hours area), Shannon 421 (electronic classroom), and Shannon 423 (smaller classroom).
Our cultural heritage informatics experts, Will Rourk and Arin Bennett, are currently seated on the third floor of Clemons Library, which is just southwest of Shannon; if you’re standing on the Shannon front steps facing south, turn right (you’ll pass the Harrison-Small Special Collections building, which has rockers on a front porch), then walk past the Aviator Statue and the outdoor terrace to find Clemons’ front doors. Inside Clemons, turn right to find the elevator/stairwell; after entering the 3rd floor, turn right and walk past the DML lab area to find their offices (Will and Arin request folks email them first for an appointment, as they are not always working from their desks).