eine Zwischenbilanz aus umweltpolitischer Sicht

Ansätze strategischer Nachhaltigkeitsplanung haben sich seit der Konferenz von Rio (1992) weltweit überdurchschnittlich schnell ausgebreitet. Dennoch bleiben ihre Funktion und Qualität weiter umstritten. Ausgehend von dieser Debatte werden hier exemplarisch die Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien Deutschlands und der Europäischen Union aus umweltpolitischer Sicht bewertet. Die Analyse der beiden Strategien zeigt, dass diese überwiegend hinter dem Steuerungsmodell der Agenda 21 zurückbleiben. Insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Ziel- und Ergebnisorientierung sowie die Förderung der horizontalen Umweltpolitikintegration sind erhebliche Defizite zu beobachten. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollten Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien zukünftig als institutioneller wie thematischer Rahmen aufgewertet werden, in dem die ökologische, ökonomische und soziale Langzeitperspektive der Gesellschaft systematisch und koordiniert zur Sprache kommt. Konkrete Verbesserungsvorschläge umfassen dabei insbesondere die Festlegung von Langfristzielen, die Verbesserung von Monitoring und Evaluation, horizontale Politikintegration durch integrierte Nachhaltigkeitsprüfung sowie eine gezielte Stärkung der institutionellen Basis des Nachhaltigkeitsprozesses

Visual Analysis of Engineers' Biographies and Engineering Branches

The Prosopographic Database of German Engineers 1825–1970 contains a multitude of biographical information. Given a set of research interests by collaborating historians, this paper discusses the steps undertaken (1) to extract engineering subjects from unstructured text entries in the database accompanied with geospatial and temporal information, (2) to adapt existing visual representations to facilitate exploratory analyses, and (3) to design a visual interface to support the interactive composition of engineering branches from engineering subjects to enable the comparative analysis of geospatial-temporal developments in engineering. Usage scenarios outline the benefit of the proposed visualizations for modern prosopography research

Close and Distant Reading Visualizations for the Comparative Analysis of Digital Humanities Data

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field

Exploring Life in Concentration Camps through a Visual Analysis of Prisoners’ Diaries

Diaries are private documentations of people’s lives. They contain descriptions of events, thoughts, fears, and desires. While diaries are usually kept in private, published ones, such as the diary of Anne Frank, show that they bear the potential to give personal insight into events and into the emotional impact on their authors. We present a visualization tool that provides insight into the Bergen-Belsen memorial’s diary corpus, which consists of dozens of diaries written by concentration camp prisoners. We designed a calendar view that documents when authors wrote about concentration camp life. Different modes support quantitative and sentiment analyses, and we provide a solution for historians to create thematic concepts that can be used for searching and filtering for specific diary entries. The usage scenarios illustrate the importance of the tool for researchers and memorial visitors as well as for commemorating the Holocaust

Timages: Enhancing Time Graphs with Iconographic Information

Various time-based visualization techniques have been designed to support the temporal analysis of data collections. While quantities play a secondary role in traditional timelines that reserve space for each individual data item to be observed, time graphs rather display quantitative information and they provide interaction means to filter for a subset of the data. Timages is a hybrid approach that enhances quantitative time graphs with qualitative information in an infographic-style. By (1) scaling thumbnails of data items dependent on relevance to the observed topic and by (2) time-dependent positioning these thumbnails inside a temporally aligned area with a novel space-filling strategy, the most relevant items in the entire data collection as well as predominant data items of certain time ranges are instantly seizable without the need to interact with the time graph

Explorative Visual Analysis of Rap Music

Detecting references and similarities in music lyrics can be a difficult task. Crowdsourced knowledge platforms such as Genius. can help in this process through user-annotated information about the artist and the song but fail to include visualizations to help users find similarities and structures on a higher and more abstract level. We propose a prototype to compute similarities between rap artists based on word embedding of their lyrics crawled from Genius. Furthermore, the artists and their lyrics can be analyzed using an explorative visualization system applying multiple visualization methods to support domain-specific tasks

Visual Text Analysis in Digital Humanities

In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi-faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area

Interactive Visual Alignment of Medieval Text Versions

Textual criticism consists of the identification and analysis of variant readings among different versions of a text. Being a relatively simple task for modern languages, the collation of medieval text traditions ranges from the complex to the virtually impossible depending on the degree of instability of textual transmission. We present a visual analytics environment that supports computationally aligning such complex textual differences typical of orally inflected medieval poetry. For the purpose of analyzing alignment, we provide interactive visualizations for different text hierarchy levels, specifically, a meso reading view to support investigating repetition and variance at the line level across text segments. In addition to outlining important aspects of our interdisciplinary collaboration, we emphasize the utility of the proposed system by various usage scenarios in medieval French literature

Visualizing Mouvance: Toward a visual analysis of variant medieval text traditions

Medieval literary traditions provide a particularly challenging test case for textual alignment and the visualization of variance. Whereas the editors of medieval traditions working with the printed page struggle to illustrate the complex phenomena of textual instability, research in screen-based visualization has made significant progress, allowing for complex textual situations to be captured at the micro- and the macro-level. This article uses visualization and a computational approach to identifying variance to allow the analysis of different medieval poetic works using the transcriptions of how they are found in particular manuscripts. It introduces the notion of a meso-level visualization, a visual representation of aligned text providing for comparative reading on the screen, all the while assembling non-contradictory, intuitive solutions for the visual exploration of multi-scalar variance. Building upon the literary notion of mouvance, it delves into medieval French literature and, in particular, different visualizations of three versions of the Chanson de Roland (the Oxford, the Châteauroux, and the Venice 4 manuscripts). The article presents experimental prototypes for such meso-level visualization and explores how they can advance our understanding of formulaically rich medieval poetry