Telling multifaceted stories with humanities data: Visualizing book of hours manuscripts

The Book of Hours is a type of book artifact that was produced and circulated in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Its name is from the fact that each book contains a sequence of prayers that were recited hourly throughout the day. This study examines the visualization of a dataset of Books of Hours collection, which was curated and digitized at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. We performed a data cleaning and manipulation procedure on this manuscript dataset and created information visualization using the R programming language. Aiming to communicate to the wider audience the rich history of Books of Hours with meaningful visualizations, we focused on the temporality, spatiality, and decoration aspects of the resource. This project serves as a point of departure to engage in broader topics at the intersection of information visualization, digital humanities, and manuscript studies, especially how to leverage humanistic interpretations of data into visualization practices