Digital humanities is text heavy, visualization light, and simulation poor

This article examines the question of whether Digital Humanities has given too much focus to text over non-text media and provides four major reasons to encourage more non-text-focused research under the umbrella of Digital Humanities. How could Digital Humanities engage in more humanities-oriented rhetorical and critical visualization, and not only in the development of scientific visualization and information visualization

Speculative practices : utilizing InfoVis to explore untapped literary collections

Funding: Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilIn this paper we exemplify how information visualization supports speculative thinking, hypotheses testing, and preliminary interpretation processes as part of literary research. While InfoVis has become a buzz topic in the digital humanities, skepticism remains about how effectively it integrates into and expands on traditional humanities research approaches. From an InfoVis perspective, we lack case studies that show the specific design challenges that make literary studies and humanities research at large a unique application area for information visualization. We examine these questions through our case study of the Speculative W@nderverse, a visualization tool that was designed to enable the analysis and exploration of an untapped literary collection consisting of thousands of science fiction short stories. We present the results of two empirical studies that involved general-interest readers and literary scholars who used the evolving visualization prototype as part of their research for over a year. Our findings suggest a design space for visualizing literary collections that is defined by (1) their academic and public relevance, (2) the tension between qualitative vs. quantitative methods of interpretation, (3) result- vs. process-driven approaches to InfoVis, and (4) the unique material and visual qualities of cultural collections. Through the Speculative W@nderverse we demonstrate how visualization can bridge these sometimes contradictory perspectives by cultivating curiosity and providing entry points into literary collections while, at the same time, supporting multiple aspects of humanities research processes.PostprintPeer reviewe

Analyzing Visual Mappings of Traditional and Alternative Music Notation

In this paper, we postulate that combining the domains of information visualization and music studies paves the ground for a more structured analysis of the design space of music notation, enabling the creation of alternative music notations that are tailored to different users and their tasks. Hence, we discuss the instantiation of a design and visualization pipeline for music notation that follows a structured approach, based on the fundamental concepts of information and data visualization. This enables practitioners and researchers of digital humanities and information visualization, alike, to conceptualize, create, and analyze novel music notation methods. Based on the analysis of relevant stakeholders and their usage of music notation as a mean of communication, we identify a set of relevant features typically encoded in different annotations and encodings, as used by interpreters, performers, and readers of music. We analyze the visual mappings of musical dimensions for varying notation methods to highlight gaps and frequent usages of encodings, visual channels, and Gestalt laws. This detailed analysis leads us to the conclusion that such an under-researched area in information visualization holds the potential for fundamental research. This paper discusses possible research opportunities, open challenges, and arguments that can be pursued in the process of analyzing, improving, or rethinking existing music notation systems and techniques.Comment: 5 pages including references, 3rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, Vis4DH, IEEE Vis 201

Multimodal analogs to infer humanities visualization requirements

Gaps and requirements for multi-modal interfaces for humanities can be explored by observing the configuration of real-world environments and the tasks of visitors within them compared to digital environments. Examples include stores, museums, galleries, and stages with tasks similar to visualization tasks such as overview, zoom and detail; multi-dimensional reduction; collaboration; and comparison; with real-world environments offering much richer interactions. Some of these capabilities exist with the technology and visualization research, but not routinely available in implementations.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures. Visualization for Digital Humanities 202

Fusion and Reconstruction: the Politics of Translation and Reception in Late Twentieth Century Chinese Literature

The main aim of my honor thesis is to examine the influence of the translated foreign literature in People\u27s Republic of China in the 1980s. Specifically, this thesis will trace the impact of literary translation on contemporary Chinese literature by 1) analyzing the situation of literary translation into Chinese during that period with Digital Humanities approaches and 2) conducting philological researches on translation theories and Chinese contemporary literature after 1980. Digital Humanities (DH) refer to the humanistic studies that are assisted by digital tools on aspects such as computation and visualization

Critical Collection Analysis: Using DH Tools to Contextualize Historical Collecting Patterns within a Political Framework

With the growth of digital humanities and a wide range of free and open source analysis tools at our fingertips, librarians have a unique opportunity to use these new tools to critically analyze library collections. Moving beyond usage and budgets, strategies such as text analysis, temporal pattern finding and data visualization offer insights into the structure and content of our collections, which in turn supports evidenced-based decision-making for future acquisitions. At the Claremont Colleges Library, librarians across divisions have been encouraged to learn tools and approaches to Digital Humanities, and apply these principles to our own work and relationships with researchers. This presentation was delivered on Friday, November 4th at the Charleston Conference. It covered: methods for gathering historic acquisitions data; strategies for using Digital Humanities tools to both analyze and communicate findings; an overview of this team\u27s findings on terrorism and collection development at Claremont; and potential future applications for the use of Digital Humanities tools to support collection assessment and development

Visualizing the Past: Tools and Techniques for Understanding Historical Processes

The University of Richmond requests a Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to bring together experts for investigations about how to overcome limitations that prevent most humanities scholars from taking advantage of visualization techniques in their research. The grant will fund a two-day workshop where invited scholars will discuss current work on visualizing historical processes, and together consider: (1) How can we harness emerging cyber-infrastructure tools and interoperability standards to explore, visualize, and analyze spatial and temporal components of distributed digital archives to better understand historical events and processes? (2) How can user-friendly tools or web sites be created to allow scholars and researchers to animate spatial and temporal data housed on different systems across the Internet? The grant will also fund initial experiments toward creating new tools for overcoming obstacles to data visualization work. Results will be presented as a white paper

Mining the Indianapolis Recorder: An Exploratory Study of a Digital Humanities Dataset

This poster presents an initial study using full-text transcripts from the Indianapolis Recorder, one of the nation's most important African American newspapers. Basic text mining and visualization approaches are used to highlight this data set and its potential for use in the digital humanities

Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research

Due to their historical nature, humanistic data encompass multiple sources of uncertainty. While humanists are accustomed to handling such uncertainty with their established methods, they are cautious of visualizations that appear overly objective and fail to communicate this uncertainty. To design more trustworthy visualizations for humanistic research, therefore, a deeper understanding of its relation to uncertainty is needed. We systematically reviewed 126 publications from digital humanities literature that use visualization as part of their research process, and examined how uncertainty was handled and represented in their visualizations. Crossing these dimensions with the visualization type and use, we identified that uncertainty originated from multiple steps in the research process from the source artifacts to their datafication. We also noted how besides known uncertainty coping strategies, such as excluding data and evaluating its effects, humanists also embraced uncertainty as a separate dimension important to retain. By mapping how the visualizations encoded uncertainty, we identified four approaches that varied in terms of explicitness and customization. This work contributes with two empirical taxonomies of uncertainty and it's corresponding coping strategies, as well as with the foundation of a research agenda for uncertainty visualization in the digital humanities. Our findings further the synergy among humanists and visualization researchers, and ultimately contribute to the development of more trustworthy, uncertainty-aware visualizations