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

Children’s Creativity Lab : creating a ‘pen of the future’

This work is funded by EPSRC and SICSA.Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advancements exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a creativity lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11–12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designers and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.Postprin

Synesthetic visualization: balancing sensate experience and sense making in digitized print collections

Large-scale digitization appears to put literary collections at one’s fingertips, but, as some critical observers warn, the books themselves are increasingly out of reach as libraries continue to shift from being “physical repositories and research spaces” to becoming “access portals” to digitized materials (Stauffer, 2012). The digital surrogates of print books preserve verbal content but not their many meaningful physical features, which are largely obscured in digitization processes. As many critics recognize, with the passing of the age of print we have become increasingly aware of “the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it” (Hayles, 2012), and by contrast we glimpse the devaluation of materiality that appears to haunt digital culture (Hayles, 1999). What are the best ways to treat print-based collections digitally? How can we harness the potential of digital media to better represent and analyze cultural collections, accentuating their unique aesthetic and material qualities while also allowing for diverse perspectives and rich linking supported by computer-assisted content analyses? In this paper we synthesize perspectives from book history, reception studies, literary studies, information visualization, human computer interaction (HCI) and digital arts to discuss practical approaches to these questions. Working with the Bob Gibson anthologies of speculative fiction—a unique collection of periodical-based science fiction selectively assembled, annotated, and bound into 888 handcrafted booklets by an avid science fiction fan, collector and artist—we explore possibilities for digital synesthesia and multi-modal interaction in sketching how digital representations of print collections can go far beyond typical digital library interfaces. By embracing a synergy between content-related metadata and physical artifactual characteristics (e.g. size, weight, paper texture, typography), we seek to engage multiple sensory modalities and provoke critical and aesthetic engagement with digitized print collections.Postprin

In defence of sandcastles : research thinking through visualization in DH

Although recent research acknowledges the potential of visualization methods in DH, the predominant terminology used to describe visualizations (prototypes, tools) narrowly focuses on their use as a means to an end and, more importantly, as an instrument in the service of humanities research. While acknowledging the broad range of possible approaches to visualization, we introduce the metaphor of the sandcastle to highlight visualization as a research process in its own right. We argue that building visualization sandcastles provides a holistic approach to interdisciplinary knowledge generation that embraces visualization as (1) a dynamic interdisciplinary process where speculation and re-interpretation advance knowledge in all disciplines involved, (2) a mediator of ideas and theories within and across disciplines and (3) an aesthetic provocation to elicit critical insights, interpretation, speculation and discussions within and beyond scholarly audiences. We illustrate our argument based on our own research of an exceptional literary collection.Postprin

The stuff of science fiction : an experiment in literary history

Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaThis article argues for a speculative, exploratory approach to literary history that incorporates information visualization early on into, and throughout, the research process. The proposed methodology combines different kinds of expertise—including that of fans and scholars in both literary studies and computer science—in processing and sharing unique cultural materials. Working with a vast fan-curated archive, we suggest tempering scholarly approaches to the history of science fiction (SF) with fan perspectives and demonstrate how information visualization can be incorporated into humanistic research processes, supporting exploration and interpretation of little-known cultural collections.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Elicitation Interview technique : capturing people’s experiences of data representations

Information visualization has become a popular tool to facilitate sense-making, discovery and communication in a large range of professional and casual contexts. However, evaluating visualizations is still a challenge. In particular, we lack techniques to help understand how visualizations are experienced by people. In this paper we discuss the potential of the Elicitation Interview technique to be applied in the context of visualization. The Elicitation Interview is a method for gathering detailed and precise accounts of human experience. We argue that it can be applied to help understand how people experience and interpret visualizations as part of exploration and data analysis processes. We describe the key characteristics of this interview technique and present a study we conducted to exemplify how it can be applied to evaluate data representations. Our study illustrates the types of insights this technique can bring to the fore, for example, evidence for deep interpretation of visual representations and the formation of interpretations and stories beyond the represented data. We discuss general visualization evaluation scenarios where the Elicitation Interview technique may be beneficial and specify what needs to be considered when applying this technique in a visualization context specifically.PostprintPeer reviewe

Data craft: integrating data into daily practices and shared reflections

We explore data craft as a means to create mementos that integrate data about personal and shared experiences into people’s everyday lives. Digital mementos, e.g., in form of visualizations, aim to support personal and joint reminiscing by leveraging personal data archives. However, their digital nature can complicate value construction and integration with social and everyday practices. We propose to consider data craft—the manual crafting of functional objects that incorporate personal visualizations—as an opportunity to create meaningful physical objects. We suggest that the manual creation and habitual use of these objects adds to their perceived value and authenticity and can spark recollection based on digital traces of personal and shared experiences. We illustrate the concept of data craft through examples and reflect on the resulting objects as keepsakes and gifts that strengthen social relationships.PostprintPeer reviewe

Externalizing Transformations of Historical Documents: Opportunities for Provenance-Driven Visualization

Transcription, annotation, digitization and/or visualization are common transformations that historical documents such as national records, birth/death registers, university records, letters or books undergo. Reasons for those transformations span from the (physical) protection of the original materials to disclosure of 'hidden' information or patterns within the documents. Even though such transformations bring new insights and perspectives on the documents, they also modify the documents' content, structure, and/or artifactual form and thus, occlude prior knowledge and interpretation. When it comes to visualization as a means to transform historical documents from written to abstract visual form, there is typically little acknowledgment or even understanding of the previous transformation steps these documents have gone through. The 'tremendous rhetorical force' of visualization, we argue, should not be at the expense of the multiple pasts, contexts, and curators that are inherent in historical record collections. Rather, the urgent question for the fields of visualization and the (digital) humanities is how to better support awareness of these multiple layers of interpretation and the people behind them when representing historical documents. We begin to address this question based on a collection of historical university records by (a) investigating common transformation processes of historical documents, and (b) discussing opportunities and challenges for making such transformations transparent through what we call 'provenance-driven visualization'; the idea for a visualization that makes visible the layers of transformation (including interpretation, re-structuring, and curation) inherent in historical documents

Bottom-up vs. top-down : trade-offs in efficiency, understanding, freedom and creativity with InfoVis tools

The emergence of tools that support fast-and-easy visualization creation by non-experts has made the benefits of InfoVis widely accessible. Key features of these tools include attribute-level operations, automated mappings, and visualization templates. However, these features shield people from lower-level visualization design steps, such as the specific mapping of data points to visuals. In contrast, recent research promotes constructive visualization where individual data units and visuals are directly manipulated. We present a qualitative study comparing people's visualization processes using two visualization tools: one promoting a top-down approach to visualization construction (Tableau Desktop) and one implementing a bottom-up constructive visualization approach (iVoLVER). Our results show how the two approaches influence: 1) the visualization process, 2) decisions on the visualization design, 3) the feeling of control and authorship, and 4) the willingness to explore alternative designs. We discuss the complex trade-offs between the two approaches and outline considerations for designing better visualization tools.Postprin