I'm afraid someone may come along and pinch me, to wake me up from this awesome dream.

As Bethany Nowviskie has already announced, I'm going be a visiting scholar for Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia for the Fall semester. To say that I'm honored would be an understatement. The work that comes out of Scholars' Lab is incredible, and having opportunity to work along side the folks here is really a privilege. What's great is that I'll be working on a project that utilizes tools that both Scholars' Lab and the Center for History and New Media have been working on the past several years. I'll be using Omeka and Neatline to create a digital archive and scholarly exhibit on residential segregation in Richmond, Virginia in the early 20th century, and along the way explore some issues in doing scholarship in the digital humanities.

A little background: From about 1910 to 1929, both the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia passed and amended several ordinances that established racially-segregated residential areas. These ordinances basically determined whether a street was a "white" or "colored" street, and hence restricted residence based on those designations.

My interest in this topic was sparked by a controversy I stumbled upon while doing research for my Master's thesis. In July 1914, the congregation of Emanuel Baptist Church in Richmond sought to sell its church property to a black congregation from Leigh Street Methodist Church. Emanuel Baptist sat on the northeast corner of 5th St. and Leigh St (a corner that no longer exists, thanks to the convention center in Richmond). According to Richmond's 1910 residential segregation ordinance, the block of Leigh Street where Emanuel Church stood was a white block, while the block of 5th Street was black. Because the address and front door of Emanuel Church was on Leigh Street, the parties involved decided that, to circumvent the segregation ordinance, they would move the front door and address to 5th Street, and thus still adhere to spirit of the ordinance.

Of course, this "solution" didn't fly too well with city government, or with a hundred or so white residents near the church who created and signed two petitions asking the city to halt the sale of the church. So, the city passed a new ordinance in October 1914 that contained language to redefine the section of 5th Street on which Emanuel Baptist Church sat as a white street. Even though the 1914 ordinance was passed specifically to prevent the sale of Emanuel Baptist Church, its definition also applied to the rest of the city, thus potentially changing the racial designation of other streets in Richmond. Residential segregation ordinances across the US were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1929, but their effects certainly continued beyond that.

I'll use Omeka to create an archive of primary sources related to Emanuel Baptist Church, and Richmond's residential segregation laws in general. I'll also use Omeka's ExhibitBuilder plugin to create the essay. I'll use Neatline to display GIS data collected for this project. I'm particularly interested in how the residential designations of the city changed with each ordinance. So I plan to map how the drawing of segregated streets changed over time with each new ordinance. I also hope to create several other maps, including a map of the addresses for each person who petitioned the city to prevent the sale of Emanuel Church, and a map for each case brought before city courts that violated residential segregation ordinances.

In addition to the specific historical research, I'll also be exploring some issues in digital history/humanities:

• Potential uses for HTML5 for digital humanities projects. I've been eagerly reading about developments on HTML5 for some time now, and am interested to see how it can be used for digital humanities work. I plan to use HTML5 for my project's site, and explore as much of the spec and its features as I can. I've got a post series outline just for this, and plan for my work at Scholars' Lab to contribute to those posts. I'll also develop an Omeka theme that uses HTML5, and release that to the public sometime this Fall.

• Potential uses for Omeka and plugins as platforms for digital scholarship. This is a topic we discuss occasionally among the Omeka team. Even though Omeka is designed as an archiving and exhibiting platform, and marketed mainly to institutions instead of individuals, I think it has lots of potential as a platform for publishing scholarship. So I hope my work on this project will help to flesh out that potential.

• Design approaches for digital scholarship. I'm keenly interested in how we can better use design in humanities scholarship, digital or other wise. I think it's important for the DH community to discuss this more, and hope I can contribute something to this while I'm at Scholars' Lab. For folks following recent conversations on Twitter and blog posts about user testing in DH, I'll be making plans for user testing, but also thinking/writing about how digital scholars can and should integrate user testing into their scholarly work. I've had a post still in draft with thoughts on this from last week that I hope to publish soon.

I'm incredibly grateful to Bethany and the rest of the folks at Scholars' Lab for giving me this opportunity. I'm also grateful to Tom Scheinfeldt and CHNM for letting me spend some time in Charlottesville. I just arrived at Scholars' Lab yesterday, and will be in Charlottesville for the next two weeks. Then I'll spend some more time here this Fall. At the end of this, in December, I'll give a presentation about my research and the final product. All the work I do on this project will, I hope, contribute in positive ways back to Omeka and Neatline. And of course any code I create will be open source.

When Brian Croxall asked about advice to give to new grad students, I tweeted "Do everything you can to do work you enjoy, and enjoy the work you do. Otherwise, it truly is not worth it." I've been doing work I enjoy, and enjoying the work I do, for so long now I forget that I'm a grad student. This, what I am doing right now, with Scholars' Lab and with CHNM every day, is truly worth it.