Digital Scholarship Lab

What Digital Scholarship Lab does

The Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) is a non-commercial academic digital humanities research laboratory housed within Boatwright Memorial Library at the University of Richmond in Virginia. The lab produces interactive web-based mapping and data visualization projects that explore themes in American history, including elections, redlining, emancipation, forced migration, foreign-born population, urban renewal, westward expansion, and presidential foreign travel. Its portfolio comprises more than 17 major projects, anchored by the American Panorama flagship historical atlas and standalone projects such as Mapping Inequality, Visualizing Emancipation, The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, Not Even Past, and 1853 Richmond and its Slave Market (a 3D animated reconstruction).

The lab's technical stack combines geospatial technologies (georectification, interactive mapping), topic modeling for historical newspaper analysis, computer vision through the affiliated Distant Viewing Lab, and 3D modeling pipelines using ESRI CityEngine, SketchUp, and After Effects. Notable data assets include nearly 700 georectified historical maps, over 300 HOLC redlining maps, 3,400 emancipation events, 850,000 documented enslaved people in the forced migration database, and 170,000+ FSA/OWI photographs. All projects are made available free of charge through web-based platforms, with no commercial pricing tiers.

The lab is funded through foundation and government grants (notably Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and National Endowment for the Humanities) supplemented by University of Richmond institutional support. It has six core staff, supplemented by affiliated faculty research fellows. Customer segments are horizontal — academic researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, K-12 educators, and the general public — with no commercial go-to-market motion; outreach occurs via academic conferences, scholarly publications, and the wider digital humanities community.

Name

Digital Scholarship Lab

Legal name

Digital Scholarship Lab

Website

https://dsl.richmond.edu

Company type

Private

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

The Digital Scholarship Lab is an academic digital humanities research laboratory at the University of Richmond that creates free, interactive web-based mapping and data visualization projects exploring American history. It serves academic researchers, students, K-12 educators, and the public through grant-funded open-access platforms.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Digital Humanities Research

NAICS

Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities (54172), Libraries and Archives (51921)

SIC

Miscellaneous Publishing (2741)

akta.pro primary industry

Humanities & Arts Scholarly Publishing (EDAGAFAE)

akta.pro secondary industries

Open Access Scholarly Journals & Monographs (EDAGAFAJ), Scholarly & Academic Multimedia (Research Videos, Interactive Figures) (EDAGALAJ), Interactive Multimedia Learning Content (Video, Audio, Interactive Lessons) (EDAFACAG)

Keywords

• Digital humanities research
• Interactive historical mapping
• American history visualization
• Geospatial humanities platforms
• Open-access historical atlas

Headquarters

HQ city

Richmond

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Foundation and Government Grants: Primary funding comes from grants including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) We the People program. These grants fund specific project development.
2. University of Richmond Institutional Support: The lab receives institutional support from the University of Richmond including staff time, infrastructure, and operational resources through Boatwright Memorial Library.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels4 records

Core offering

The Digital Scholarship Lab creates open-access interactive web-based mapping and data visualization projects that explore themes, issues, and conflicts in American history. Its flagship American Panorama project and other digital humanities initiatives (e.g., Mapping Inequality, Visualizing Emancipation, Mining the Dispatch, Not Even Past, Southern Journey, 1853 Richmond and its Slave Market) provide researchers, students, educators, and the general public with free tools to analyze historical geospatial data including elections, redlining, migration, forced migration, emancipation, and urban history.

Product overview

Digital Scholarship Lab creates digital humanities projects exploring American history through interactive mapping and data visualization. The flagship product is American Panorama, an interactive historical atlas featuring multiple sub-products including Mapping Inequality (redlining maps), Electing the President, Electing the House of Representatives, Foreign-Born Population, Forced Migration of Enslaved People, The Overland Trails, Land Acquisition and Dispossession, Renewing Inequality, The Executive Abroad, and Canals. Beyond American Panorama, the portfolio includes The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (digitized 1932 atlas), Mining the Dispatch (topic modeling of Civil War newspapers), Not Even Past (social vulnerability and redlining), Southern Journey (migrations of the American South), The Fall of Confederate Richmond (animated April 1865 events), 1853 Richmond and its Slave Market (3D animated map), Redlining Richmond (story map), and Visualizing Emancipation (Civil War emancipation patterns). Together these products provide comprehensive interactive tools for exploring American history through spatial and temporal data visualization.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• American Panorama: Historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century combining cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques. Flagship project of the Digital Scholarship Lab featuring multiple themed maps on migration, politics, race, and more.

Products and services

• American Panorama An interactive historical atlas of the United States that combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, allowing exploration of American history through topics including migration, politics, race, slavery, transportation, and foreign policy.
• Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America Interactive maps exploring the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's redlining maps from 1935-1940 that explicitly endorsed and advanced racial discrimination in housing and real estate across major American cities. Provides access to more than 300 HOLC redlining maps.
• Electing the President Interactive map focusing on the popular vote in U.S. presidential elections from 1840 to 2024, shifting focus from the Electoral College to American voters and the nuanced landscape of the popular vote across nearly 50 presidential elections.
• Electing the House of Representatives Interactive map of congressional elections from 1840 to 2024, showing changing patterns across regions and between urban and rural areas for the most democratic body in the federal government.
• The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States Digital edition of Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's 1932 historical atlas, featuring nearly 700 georectified and animated maps enhanced for the twenty-first century with clickable data access overlaying historical maps on modern digital maps.
• Mining the Dispatch Interactive platform using topic modeling to explore themes and topics in the Richmond Daily Dispatch during the Civil War, examining the social and political life of Civil War Richmond from 1860 to 1865.
• Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining Interactive platform juxtaposing 1930s HOLC redlining maps with contemporary CDC Social Vulnerability Index scores for approximately 200 U.S. cities, revealing the long-lasting impact of racial segregation and redlining.
• Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 StoryMap companion to Edward L. Ayers's book, tracing the history of the American South through the movement of people using high-resolution hexagon-based mapping techniques.
• The Fall of Confederate Richmond Animated map illustrating the dramatic events of April 2-4, 1865, including the Confederate evacuation, fires, Union occupation, emancipation, and Lincoln's visit to the former Confederate capital.
• 1853 Richmond and its Slave Market Animated 3D map of Richmond in 1853 focusing on the city's slave market, featuring over 3,000 buildings generated using ESRI's CityEngine with detailed modeling of auction houses and slave jails.
• Redlining Richmond Interactive story map exploring the history of redlining in Richmond, Virginia, and its lasting echoes including associations with poverty, health, climate, life expectancy, tree cover, and heat islands.
• Visualizing Emancipation Map of slavery's end during the American Civil War, finding patterns in the collapse of southern slavery by mapping interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and enslaved people. Features approximately 3,400 emancipation events.
• Foreign-Born Population Interactive map exploring changing patterns in immigration to the United States over nearly two centuries (1850-2020), showing the United States as a nation of overlapping diasporas with data on 42,749,138 foreign-born residents in 2020.
• Forced Migration of Enslaved People Interactive map showing the forced migration of approximately 850,000 enslaved men, women, and children from the Upper South to the Lower South through the domestic slave trade between 1810 and 1860.
• The Overland Trails Interactive map of westward migration from the East to Oregon, California, and Utah (1840-1860), featuring diarist accounts and travel patterns of tens of thousands of Americans seeking land, gold, and religious freedom.
• Land Acquisition and Dispossession Interactive map visualizing the transfer of land from Native nations to the federal public domain and then into private hands through the Homestead Act (1863-1912).
• Renewing Inequality Interactive visualization of family displacements through federally-funded urban renewal programs between 1950-1966, showing how displacements affected communities of color across over 600 cities.
• The Executive Abroad Interactive map of international trips of U.S. presidents and secretaries of state from 1900-2021, showing the shifting geopolitical focus of American foreign policy.
• Canals Interactive map of American canals (1820-1890) showing how thousands of miles of canals transformed the American landscape and economy by connecting areas west of the Appalachians to eastern population centers.
• The History Engine A collection of thousands of historical episodes contributed by undergraduate students from approximately three dozen colleges and universities that paints a wide-ranging portrait of the past.

Quantifiable outcome

• Free access to 17+ major digital humanities projects
• +2 more outcomes

Named customers3 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability4 records

Feature7 records

Partnerships

Four partnerships are on record, tiered major, core and minor.

• National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC)majorStrategic or Co-development PartnerNCRC collaborated with DSL to create Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining, bringing together historical HOLC data with contemporary health disparities for 200 cities.
• EsrimajorTechnology or IntegrationEsri provides the ArcGIS StoryMaps platform used for Southern Journey and other projects. Their technology enables the interactive storytelling and mapping capabilities.
• University of RichmondcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerThe University of Richmond hosts the DSL and Boatwright Memorial Library, providing institutional infrastructure, staff support, and funding for all projects.
• University of Virginia - Valley of the Shadow ProjectminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerVisualizing Emancipation draws on the Valley of the Shadow digital archive from UVA for newspaper sources documenting emancipation events.

Scale indicators9 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights4 records

Emerging players

• Historypin: Public-history platform that crowdsources geotagged historical photos and stories onto interactive maps — an emerging player in the same community-led, map-based public-history space DSL occupies, though with a broader, non-academic user base.
• Distant Viewing Lab (University of Richmond): Sister lab at the University of Richmond applying AI and computer-vision methods to visual historical sources — a closely allied emerging player with overlapping leadership context and complementary technical capabilities to DSL.

Direct peers

• Scholars' Lab (University of Virginia): A university-based digital humanities lab at UVA that builds interactive mapping, geospatial, and visualization tools for historical and humanities scholarship — a direct operational peer to DSL within the same Virginia academic ecosystem (DSL already draws on UVA's Valley of the Shadow archive).
• Northwestern University Digital Humanities: Northwestern's DH program supports digital mapping, visualization, and interactive scholarly publishing projects, positioning it as a same-type university-based peer to DSL.
• Northeastern NULab for Digital Humanities: Northeastern's digital humanities collaborative supporting mapping, text, and network analysis projects across the humanities and social sciences — a same-scale peer producing similar scholarly digital tools.
• Stanford Spatial History Lab: Stanford-affiliated lab that pioneered interactive spatial and historical visualization methods (e.g., mapping historical census and infrastructure data), making it a methodological peer to DSL's American Panorama and Mapping Inequality work.
• Emory Center for Digital Scholarship: Emory's university digital humanities center producing interactive maps, visualizations, and digital editions for historical scholarship, directly comparable to DSL in mission, scale, and methodology.

Broad incumbents

• Library of Congress Geography and Map Division: National library division holding the largest cartographic collection in the world and providing digital access and georeferencing of historical maps — a broad incumbent whose map digitization work is upstream-adjacent to DSL's georectified atlases.
• Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis: Larger Harvard-wide center providing GIS infrastructure, geospatial training, and mapping project support across humanities and social sciences — an incumbent in academic geospatial humanities with comparable goals but a much broader institutional scope than DSL.

Others

• New American History: Edward Ayers–led K-12 public-history initiative that curates and repackages American history content (including 'Bunk') for educators — a sibling initiative sharing leadership with DSL and channeling DSL's research into classrooms.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/digital-scholarship-lab

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles7 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

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Frequently asked questions about Digital Scholarship Lab