Digital Scholarship in Architecture & Planning
Digital scholarship refers broadly to research conducted using digital technologies, research on digital technologies, and research that critically examines the role of digital technologies in practice and in society.
Digital scholarship encompasses work in the humanities, design, engineering, the social sciences as well as the natural sciences, and has been increasing in importance and usefulness in the 21st century as computer technology has become more widely available and integrated into society.
In general, disciplines like architecture and planning that study the design and evolution of the built environment focus on the spatial, morphological and symbolic characteristics of buildings and landscapes, and their relationships to society and history. Digital scholarship continues and enriches this important work by providing new computational techniques for built environment research, new critical methods for analyzing data and digital tools, and new media platforms for publishing research and collaborating with other researchers.
"Digital scholarship" and "digital humanities" are often used interchangeably, but here we use "digital scholarship" to be inclusive of architecture and planning scholars who may not necessarily refer to themselves as humanities researchers.
Projects, researchers and communities
Connected to UT
UT Lists - Subscribe to news, learn about meetups, and discuss digital scholarship with the UT community
Digital Humanities Discussion List - https://utlists.utexas.edu/sympa/info/digitalhumanities
Digital Scholarship Staff Interest Group - https://utlists.utexas.edu/sympa/info/digitalscholarship
Center for Sustainable Development - https://soa.utexas.edu/libraries-centers/center-sustainable-development/projects
The Center for Sustainable Development was founded in 2001 with a mission to lead the study and practice of sustainable development in Texas, the nation, and the world through complementary programs of research, education, and community outreach. CSD projects and research incorporate a wide range of digital research methods and data sources for planners, historians and designers
LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Lab - http://sites.utexas.edu/llilasbensonds/
The DS Lab staff provides consultations on individual research projects ranging from the exploratory/conceptual to the final stage and the use of digital tools/methods, and special collections to facilitate, reinvigorate, and transform research and teaching
Relaciones Geográficas - http://sites.utexas.edu/llilasbensonds/projects/relaciones-geograficas/
Joaquín García Icazbalceta's Collection of Relaciones Geográficasof Mexico and Guatemala comprises original manuscript accounts and artistic renditions of the local geography with dates ranging from 1578 to 1586
Texas Domestic Slave Trade Project - https://txdst.la.utexas.edu/
Mapping Texas Slave Trade Routes. This website offers a digital visual history of Matagorda County by photographing archival documents and historical sites in the region. It expands on contemporary understandings of slavery in Texas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by highlighting Matagorda as a dominant city (and eponymous county) for commerce, as well as a primary entry point for enslaved people in early Texas history
Texas Freedom Colonies - http://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com
There are no comprehensive studies of threats to Texas Freedom Colony survival, documentation of Black Texans’ approaches to placemaking and problem solving, or an official atlas of settlements. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project is a research and social justice project dedicated to filling that gap
Global Middle Ages Project - http://globalmiddleages.org/about
An ambitious effort by an international collaboration of scholars to see the world whole, c. 500 to 1500 CE, to deliver the stories of lives, objects, and actions in dynamic relationship and change across deep time
Austin Historical Survey Wiki - http://soa.utexas.edu/programs/historic-preservation/work/austin-historical-survey-wiki
BattleLab - http://ut.energycurb.com/
Touchscreen access to website on Battle Hall's history, energy use, and ecological assessment. Brings together UTSOA student and faculty research and documentation about the building from collections on campus.
Outside of UT
Alan Liu's Critical Infrastructures - https://cistudies.org/critical-infrastructure-studies-primer/
Torn Apart - http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart
Volume 1: A rapidly deployed critical data & visualization intervention in the USA’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance Policy” for asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed
Volume 2: a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018
xpMethod - http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/
Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research at Columbia University
Borderlands Archives Cartography - https://www.bacartography.org/
a project that consists of a digital map which displays a U.S.-Mexico border newspapers cartography that records geographic locations of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century periodicals
Matthew Allen
Caroline Bruzelius - https://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/76/4/436
Albena Yaneva
Venice Time Machine (and ted talk)
New Haven Building Inventory
https://library.stanford.edu/research/cidr
Mapping Violence - https://mappingviolence.com/
Photogrammar - http://photogrammar.yale.edu/
- web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)
Mapping Controversies in Architecture - http://www.msa.ac.uk/mac/Main/MappingArchitecturalControversies
See Albena Yaneva's Mapping Controversies in Architecture, http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b8086064~S29
Yaneva is coming to UT as part "The Secret Lives of Buildings Symposium," https://soa.utexas.edu/events/secret-life-buildings, opening reception in the APL reading room October 20, 2016
"Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA:"
Entry about a course at Tulane, taught by Amber Wiley.
SAH Archipedia: http://sah-archipedia.org/
Free, open-access site containing entries for around 100 buildings from each state represented in SAH Archipedia.
American Architects and Buildings: http://www.americanbuildings.org/pab/
Formerly Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
Content searchable freely, images visible on website
Subscription, for an annual fee, provides you with access to the high-resolution digital images on the website. A subscription also provides discounted reproduction fees for items in the collections of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
Complex Digital Objects research project
Collaborators:
Digital Humanities Centers
UCLA: http://www.cdh.ucla.edu/
Stanford: https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/about-dh-stanford
University of Maryland: http://michellesmithcollaboratory.umd.edu/about-us
Behind the Scenes lunch series, Middelbury
http://sites.middlebury.edu/dla/2015/08/28/bts-2015-2016/
General readings in digital scholarship studies
Matthew Allen, https://harvard.academia.edu/MatthewAllen
Schaffner, Jennifer and Ricky Erway. 2014. Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center? Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. Report Overview, Full report PDF:
Maron, Nancy L. and Sarah Pickle. 2014. Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support beyond the Start-up Phase. Ithaka S+R. Full report PDF: .
Collections as data
https://collectionsasdata.github.io/
Fifty things you can do: https://collectionsasdata.github.io/fiftythings/
Call for Proposals, cohort 1 - October 2018 https://collectionsasdata.github.io/cfp/
Facets - EXAMPLES - https://collectionsasdata.github.io/facets/
OSF CAD wiki: https://osf.io/mx6uk/wiki/home/
Related links
Digital scholarship in libraries and archives
Digital scholarship in other humanities disciplines
Digital scholarship in other social science disciplines
Digital scholarship in other environmental science and engineering disciplines
Resources for digital scholarship projects
Guides and tutorials
UT Libraries Digital Scholarship LibGuide - https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/sb.php?subject_id=115239
This guide provides an overview of digital humanities tools, resources, publishing, and projects happening at UT and beyond
GIS & Mapping - https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/c.php?g=815192&p=5898105
Lynda.com - A library of instructional videos on a wide range of topics provided to UT student, faculty, and staff
Select "Sign in with your organization portal" to access tutorials
GIS Training and Tutorials (ArcGIS, Google Earth, etc) - https://www.lynda.com/GIS-training-tutorials/2065-0.html
Architecture Training and Tutorials (CAD, etc) - https://www.lynda.com/Architecture-training-tutorials/2-0.html
Design Training and Tutorials (Adobe, etc) - https://www.lynda.com/Design-training-tutorials/40-0.html
See also tutorials on Excel, HTML, eLearning and project management
The Programming Historian - https://programminghistorian.org
Novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching
Mapping, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/?topic=mapping
Data sources
Map imagery
Aerial photography
LIDAR data
Parcel/Cadastral data
Construction permit data
Real estate sales data
Historical survey data
US Census Bureau data
Other administrative data
Commercially-available data
Community-generated data
Library and archive metadata
Data analysis tools
CAD
BIM
GIS
Geo-referencing and geo-coding
Tableau
Python
R
Text analysis
Data collection/creation guides
Digitization and datafication
Digital photography
Using GPS
LIDAR scanning
Creating a built environment database
Data organizing and publishing
Omeka
Mapping with Omeka
Tutorials
Zotero
Digital scholarship refers broadly to research conducted using digital technologies, research on digital technologies, and research that critically examines the role of digital technologies in practice and in society.
Digital scholarship encompasses work in the humanities, design, engineering, the social sciences as well as the natural sciences, and has been increasing in importance and usefulness in the 21st century as computer technology has become more widely available and integrated into society.
In general, disciplines like architecture and planning that study the design and evolution of the built environment focus on the spatial, morphological and symbolic characteristics of buildings and landscapes, and their relationships to society and history. Digital scholarship continues and enriches this important work by providing new computational techniques for built environment research, new critical methods for analyzing data and digital tools, and new media platforms for publishing research and collaborating with other researchers.
Projects, researchers and communities
Connected to UT
Center for Sustainable Development - https://soa.utexas.edu/libraries-centers/center-sustainable-development/projects
The Center for Sustainable Development was founded in 2001 with a mission to lead the study and practice of sustainable development in Texas, the nation, and the world through complementary programs of research, education, and community outreach. CSD projects and research incorporate a wide range of digital research methods and data sources for planners, historians and designers
LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Lab - http://sites.utexas.edu/llilasbensonds/
The DS Lab staff provides consultations on individual research projects ranging from the exploratory/conceptual to the final stage and the use of digital tools/methods, and special collections to facilitate, reinvigorate, and transform research and teaching
Relaciones Geográficas - http://sites.utexas.edu/llilasbensonds/projects/relaciones-geograficas/
Joaquín García Icazbalceta's Collection of Relaciones Geográficasof Mexico and Guatemala comprises original manuscript accounts and artistic renditions of the local geography with dates ranging from 1578 to 1586
Texas Domestic Slave Trade Project - https://txdst.la.utexas.edu/
Mapping Texas Slave Trade Routes. This website offers a digital visual history of Matagorda County by photographing archival documents and historical sites in the region. It expands on contemporary understandings of slavery in Texas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by highlighting Matagorda as a dominant city (and eponymous county) for commerce, as well as a primary entry point for enslaved people in early Texas history
Texas Freedom Colonies - http://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com
There are no comprehensive studies of threats to Texas Freedom Colony survival, documentation of Black Texans’ approaches to placemaking and problem solving, or an official atlas of settlements. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project is a research and social justice project dedicated to filling that gap
Global Middle Ages Project - http://globalmiddleages.org/about
An ambitious effort by an international collaboration of scholars to see the world whole, c. 500 to 1500 CE, to deliver the stories of lives, objects, and actions in dynamic relationship and change across deep time
Austin Historical Survey Wiki:
BattleLab project: http://ut.energycurb.com/
Touchscreen access to website on Battle Hall's history, energy use, and ecological assessment. Brings together UTSOA student and faculty research and documentation about the building from collections on campus.
Outside of UT
Torn Apart - http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart
Volume 1: A rapidly deployed critical data & visualization intervention in the USA’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance Policy” for asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed
Volume 2: a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018
xpMethod - http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/
Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research at Columbia University
Borderlands Archives Cartography - https://www.bacartography.org/
a project that consists of a digital map which displays a U.S.-Mexico border newspapers cartography that records geographic locations of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century periodicals
Matthew Allen
Caroline Bruzelius - https://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/76/4/436
Albena Yaneva
Venice Time Machine (and ted talk)
New Haven Building Inventory
Mapping Violence - https://mappingviolence.com/
Photogrammar - http://photogrammar.yale.edu/
- web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)
Mapping Controversies in Architecture - http://www.msa.ac.uk/mac/Main/MappingArchitecturalControversies
See Albena Yaneva's Mapping Controversies in Architecture, http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b8086064~S29
Yaneva is coming to UT as part "The Secret Lives of Buildings Symposium," https://soa.utexas.edu/events/secret-life-buildings, opening reception in the APL reading room October 20, 2016
"Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA:"
Entry about a course at Tulane, taught by Amber Wiley.
SAH Archipedia: http://sah-archipedia.org/
Free, open-access site containing entries for around 100 buildings from each state represented in SAH Archipedia.
American Architects and Buildings: http://www.americanbuildings.org/pab/
Formerly Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
Content searchable freely, images visible on website
Subscription, for an annual fee, provides you with access to the high-resolution digital images on the website. A subscription also provides discounted reproduction fees for items in the collections of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
Complex Digital Objects research project
Collaborators:
Digital Humanities Centers
UCLA: http://www.cdh.ucla.edu/
Stanford: https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/about-dh-stanford
University of Maryland: http://michellesmithcollaboratory.umd.edu/about-us
Behind the Scenes lunch series, Middelbury
http://sites.middlebury.edu/dla/2015/08/28/bts-2015-2016/
General readings in digital scholarship studies
Matthew Allen, https://harvard.academia.edu/MatthewAllen
Schaffner, Jennifer and Ricky Erway. 2014. Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center? Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. Report Overview, Full report PDF:
Maron, Nancy L. and Sarah Pickle. 2014. Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support beyond the Start-up Phase. Ithaka S+R. Full report PDF: .
Collections as data
https://collectionsasdata.github.io/
Fifty things you can do: https://collectionsasdata.github.io/fiftythings/
Call for Proposals, cohort 1 - October 2018 https://collectionsasdata.github.io/cfp/
Facets - EXAMPLES - https://collectionsasdata.github.io/facets/
OSF CAD wiki: https://osf.io/mx6uk/wiki/home/
Related links
Digital scholarship in libraries and archives
Digital scholarship in other humanities disciplines
Digital scholarship in other social science disciplines
Digital scholarship in other environmental science and engineering disciplines
Resources for digital scholarship projects
Guides and tutorials
UT Libraries Digital Scholarship LibGuide - https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/sb.php?subject_id=115239
This guide provides an overview of digital humanities tools, resources, publishing, and projects happening at UT and beyond
GIS & Mapping - https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/c.php?g=815192&p=5898105
Lynda.com - A library of instructional videos on a wide range of topics provided to UT student, faculty, and staff
Select "
Sign in with your organization portal
GIS on the Web - https://www.lynda.com/ArcGIS-tutorials/GIS-Web/162136-2.html
The Programming Historian - Mapping, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/?topic=mapping
A peer-reviewed site that provides a number of well-written tutorials on digital humanities tools
Data sources
Map imagery
Aerial photography
LIDAR data
Parcel/Cadastral data
Construction permit data
Real estate sales data
Historical survey data
US Census Bureau data
Other administrative data
Commercially-available data
Community-generated data
Library and archive metadata
Data analysis tools
CAD
BIM
GIS
Geo-referencing and geo-coding
Tableau
Python
R
Text analysis
Data collection/creation guides
Digitization and datafication
Digital photography
Using GPS
LIDAR scanning
Creating a built environment database
Data organizing and publishing
Omeka
Mapping with Omeka
Tutorials
Zotero