Scholars' Lab Alumni Data
Last Modified: April 05, 2026 9:40am
The Scholars' Lab has awarded 122 fellowships to UVA graduate students interested in digital humanities, and 95 of them are now full-time employees, but there is currently no public demographic data available about their career pathways.
One of the tasks for my PhD Plus/Scholars' Lab internship in fall 2025 involved updating the information the lab keeps about the students who've participated in the DH and Praxis Program. These records are a series of internal documents including general details like student name, graduate program, and cohort year, but they extend to things like current and past employment for each alumnus. Though the sensitivity of this data means it has remained fully private until now, the lab team is interested in celebrating the accomplishments of its alumni. Showcasing this data also presents decisive evidence of why digital humanities (DH) training and critical digital pedagogy matter, especially in today's times of AI.
My initial goal consisted of cleaning and updating these records, or dataset, to create simple visualizations for a meeting with Shannon Library's Advancement Team. However, researching the life choices of lab alumni, as one myself, inspired me to continue working with this dataset in spring 2026. This time, my focus is to improve the cataloguing labels and develop a representation of anonymous job placement data for the Scholars' Lab website. The project is currently in progress.
