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

InVITe - Towards Intuitive Visualization of Iteration over Text

status: publishe

NAHR: a visual representation of social networks as support for art history research

In the field of art history, the analysis of community dynamics can give researchers precious insight on the subjects of their studies. Data on genealogy and community bonds can provide a rich understanding of the functioning of a community. Traditional family trees are not designed to support extra-familial links and often lack the time-bound aspect of these relationships, and timeline-style tools miss the mark on representing the network dimension of such structures. We introduce NAHR (Networks in Art History Research), a tool that visualizes small networks of families connected through marriage, god-parenthood and professional relationships, and that provides insight in the change of these dynamics over time.status: publishe

Visual anomaly detection in spatio-temporal data using element-specific references

status: publishe

Slow Digital Art History in Action: Project Cornelia’s Computational Approach to Seventeenth-century Flemish Creative Communities

This paper presents the rationale, genesis, and applications of Project Cornelia, an ongoing computational art history project developed by a cross-disciplinary team at the KU Leuven (University of Leuven). It shares practical perspectives acquired while conceptualizing and unfolding the project and discusses successes as well as challenges and setbacks. In doing so, this paper is a cautionary tale for art historians entering the digital arena. However, it is also an invitation to connect to Project Cornelia. Art historians seeking to avoid heavy start-up costs and willing to embed their research in a larger empirical and theoretical framework can easily share their data and use Cornelia’s data and tools to further their and our understanding of the genesis and governance of early modern creative communities and industries.status: Published onlin

Slow Digital Art History in Action: Project Cornelia’s Computational Approach to Seventeenth-century Flemish Creative Communities

status: accepte