The Digital Scholarship Lab creates projects that explore American history through mapping and data visualization.
American Panorama
American Panorama
is the Digital Scholarship Lab's flagship project. It uses interactive maps to illuminate themes, issues, and conflicts that have shaped American history.
Electing the President
1840-2024
Most presidential election maps emphasize the candidates and parties who won or lost the Electoral College. Electing the President shifts the focus to American voters, highlighting the more complex and nuanced landscape of the popular vote across nearly 50 presidential elections dating back to 1840.
The most democratic body in the federal government, hundreds of representatives are elected every other year. This site maps elections from before the Civil War to today, showing changing patterns across regions and between urban and rural areas.
In the 1930s the federal government created redlining maps for almost every major American city. Mapping Inequality lets you explore these maps and the history of racial and ethnic discrimination in housing policy.
The Digital Scholarship Lab is part of Boatwright Memorial Library at the University Richmond. Our projects emerge from the collaboration of a team with strengths in American history, cartography, design, web development, and digital humanities.
Robert K. Nelson
Director
Robert K. Nelson directs the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. He earned his PhD in American Studies from the College of William and Mary, beginning his career with work on slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth century. His more recent research has focused on race, inequality, and urban history, reflecting a career-long interest in the ways race has shaped
American life. In addition to leading the Lab, Nelson is deeply involved in the coding and development of its projects, where his scholarship is expressed as much in programming as in prose.
Riley D. Champine
Associate Director
Riley D. Champine is the Associate Director for the DSL. He spent seven years making maps for National Geographic Magazine and served as its Manager of Digital Cartography. Riley graduated from the University of Oregon, where he studied geographic information science and urban planning. His maps have covered a wide variety of topics including animal migration, soccer, climate
injustice, and international boundary disputes.
Chad Devers
Full Stack Library Solutions Engineer
Chad Devers is the Full Stack Library Solutions Engineer for the DSL and Digital Engagement. He’s enjoyed contributing to a wide variety of University projects, as both designer and developer, since 2011. Chad is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
Nathaniel Ayers
Visualization and Web Designer
Nathaniel Ayers is the Digital Scholarship Lab’s visualization and web designer, serving as the head of the Lab’s design work and providing technical assistance to faculty and students. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, Nathaniel has done programming and visualization work for the University of Virginia.
Nicole Sackley
Research Fellow
Nicole Sackley is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Richmond. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the United States in the World with emphasis on the Cold War era and the histories of international development, capitalism, and philanthropy. She has published in Agricultural History, Diplomatic History, History & Technology, The Journal of Global History, Modern Intellectual History, and multiple edited collections. She is the co-PI on the digital humanities project (with Tim Barney), Mapping the Ford Foundation, a collaboration with the DSL about the role of private philanthropy in the second half of the twentieth century. She is currently completing Co-op Capitalism, a monograph about U.S. cooperatives and global development in the twentieth century.
Timothy Barney
Research Fellow
Timothy Barney is a professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. He studies geopolitical and visual rhetoric, particularly the politics of cartographic representations in U.S. history, and is the author of Mapping the Cold War (University of North Carolina, 2015). He is the co-PI on the digital humanities project (with Nicole Sackley), Mapping the Ford Foundation, a collaboration with the DSL about the role of private philanthropy in the second half of the twentieth century. His current book project looks at the rhetorical and political implications of Vaclav Havel’s presidency in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.
Edward L. Ayers
Senior Research Fellow
Edward L. Ayers is Senior Research Fellow at the DSL. He is president emeritus and a professor of history at the University of Richmond. A scholar of the American South, he is the author of numerous books, including Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, and The Thin Light of Freedom, and is co-editor of the
Freedom, and is co-editor of the
Valley of the Shadow
digital archive. He is the co-primary investigator on
“Visualizing Emancipation.”
Contact
Digital Scholarship Lab
Boatwright Memorial Library
261 Richmond Way
University of Richmond, VA 23173
View Project
View Project
View Project
