How Visualization Supports the Daily Work in Traditional Humanities on the Example of Visual Analysis Case Studies

Attempts to convince humanities scholars of digital approaches are met with resistance, often. The so-called Digitization Anxiety is the phenomenon that describes the fear of many traditional scientists of being replaced by digital processes. This hinders not only the progress of the scientific domains themselves – since a lot of digital potential is missing – but also makes the everyday work of researchers unnecessarily difficult. Over the past eight years, we have made various attempts to walk the tightrope between 'How can we help traditional humanities to exploit their digital potential?' and 'How can we make them understand that their expertise is not replaced by digital means, but complemented?' We will present our successful interdisciplinary collaborations: How they came about, how they developed, and the problems we encountered. In the first step, we will look at the theoretical basics, which paint a comprehensive picture of the digital humanities and introduces us to the topic of visualization. The field of visualization has shown a special ability: It manages to walk the tightrope and thus keeps digitization anxiety at bay, while not only making it easier for scholars to access their data, but also enabling entirely new research questions. After an introduction to our interdisciplinary collaborations with the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, as well as with the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, we will present a series of user scenarios that we have collected in the course of 13 publications. These show our cooperation partners solving different research tasks, which we classify using Brehmer and Munzner’s Task Classification. In this way, we show that we provide researchers with a wide range of opportunities: They can answer their traditional research questions – and in some cases verify long-standing hypotheses about the data for the first time – but also develop their own interest in previously impossible, new research questions and approaches. Finally, we conclude our insights on individual collaborative ideas with perspectives on our newest projects. These have risen from the growing interest of collaborators in the methods we deliver. For example, we get insights into the music of real virtuosos of the 20th century. The necessary music storage media can be heard for the first time through digital tools without risking damage to the old material. In addition, we can provide computer-aided analysis capabilities that help musicologists in their work. In the course of the visualization project at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, we will see that what was once a small diary project has grown into a multimodal and international project with institutions of culture and science from eight countries. This is dedicated not only to the question of preserving cultural objects from Nazi persecution contexts but also to modern ways of disseminating and processing knowledge around this context. Finally, we will compile our experience and accumulated knowledge in the form of problems and challenges at the border between computer science and traditional humanities. These will serve as preparation and assistance for future and current interested parties of such interdisciplinary collaborative project

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

MusiXplora: Visualizing Geospatial Data in the Musicological Domain

The musiXplora is an interactive and multimodal tool for the domain of musicology, developed in a collaborative and interdisciplinary fashion. It serves as a research environment that, on the one hand, links large data collections on musicians, musical instruments, events and more, and, on the other hand, offers a set of visualizations which allow users to explore and analyze these data sets comprehensively. In this paper, we discuss our recent work to emphasize the relevance of geovisualizations in the musicological domain and provide detailed insights into how the musiXplora can be used to address geospatial research questions. We introduce two distinct use cases and discuss how musicologists can use the musiXplora’s geovisualizations as distant-reading tools. Thereby we demonstrate how the musiXplora can contribute to the confirmation of existing hypotheses and to the formulation of new ones

How Visualization Supports the Daily Work in Traditional Humanities on the Example of Visual Analysis Case Studies

Attempts to convince humanities scholars of digital approaches are met with resistance, often. The so-called Digitization Anxiety is the phenomenon that describes the fear of many traditional scientists of being replaced by digital processes. This hinders not only the progress of the scientific domains themselves – since a lot of digital potential is missing – but also makes the everyday work of researchers unnecessarily difficult. Over the past eight years, we have made various attempts to walk the tightrope between 'How can we help traditional humanities to exploit their digital potential?' and 'How can we make them understand that their expertise is not replaced by digital means, but complemented?' We will present our successful interdisciplinary collaborations: How they came about, how they developed, and the problems we encountered. In the first step, we will look at the theoretical basics, which paint a comprehensive picture of the digital humanities and introduces us to the topic of visualization. The field of visualization has shown a special ability: It manages to walk the tightrope and thus keeps digitization anxiety at bay, while not only making it easier for scholars to access their data, but also enabling entirely new research questions. After an introduction to our interdisciplinary collaborations with the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, as well as with the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, we will present a series of user scenarios that we have collected in the course of 13 publications. These show our cooperation partners solving different research tasks, which we classify using Brehmer and Munzner’s Task Classification. In this way, we show that we provide researchers with a wide range of opportunities: They can answer their traditional research questions – and in some cases verify long-standing hypotheses about the data for the first time – but also develop their own interest in previously impossible, new research questions and approaches. Finally, we conclude our insights on individual collaborative ideas with perspectives on our newest projects. These have risen from the growing interest of collaborators in the methods we deliver. For example, we get insights into the music of real virtuosos of the 20th century. The necessary music storage media can be heard for the first time through digital tools without risking damage to the old material. In addition, we can provide computer-aided analysis capabilities that help musicologists in their work. In the course of the visualization project at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, we will see that what was once a small diary project has grown into a multimodal and international project with institutions of culture and science from eight countries. This is dedicated not only to the question of preserving cultural objects from Nazi persecution contexts but also to modern ways of disseminating and processing knowledge around this context. Finally, we will compile our experience and accumulated knowledge in the form of problems and challenges at the border between computer science and traditional humanities. These will serve as preparation and assistance for future and current interested parties of such interdisciplinary collaborative project

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

How Visualization Supports the Daily Work in Traditional Humanities on the Example of Visual Analysis Case Studies

Attempts to convince humanities scholars of digital approaches are met with resistance, often. The so-called Digitization Anxiety is the phenomenon that describes the fear of many traditional scientists of being replaced by digital processes. This hinders not only the progress of the scientific domains themselves – since a lot of digital potential is missing – but also makes the everyday work of researchers unnecessarily difficult. Over the past eight years, we have made various attempts to walk the tightrope between 'How can we help traditional humanities to exploit their digital potential?' and 'How can we make them understand that their expertise is not replaced by digital means, but complemented?' We will present our successful interdisciplinary collaborations: How they came about, how they developed, and the problems we encountered. In the first step, we will look at the theoretical basics, which paint a comprehensive picture of the digital humanities and introduces us to the topic of visualization. The field of visualization has shown a special ability: It manages to walk the tightrope and thus keeps digitization anxiety at bay, while not only making it easier for scholars to access their data, but also enabling entirely new research questions. After an introduction to our interdisciplinary collaborations with the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, as well as with the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, we will present a series of user scenarios that we have collected in the course of 13 publications. These show our cooperation partners solving different research tasks, which we classify using Brehmer and Munzner’s Task Classification. In this way, we show that we provide researchers with a wide range of opportunities: They can answer their traditional research questions – and in some cases verify long-standing hypotheses about the data for the first time – but also develop their own interest in previously impossible, new research questions and approaches. Finally, we conclude our insights on individual collaborative ideas with perspectives on our newest projects. These have risen from the growing interest of collaborators in the methods we deliver. For example, we get insights into the music of real virtuosos of the 20th century. The necessary music storage media can be heard for the first time through digital tools without risking damage to the old material. In addition, we can provide computer-aided analysis capabilities that help musicologists in their work. In the course of the visualization project at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, we will see that what was once a small diary project has grown into a multimodal and international project with institutions of culture and science from eight countries. This is dedicated not only to the question of preserving cultural objects from Nazi persecution contexts but also to modern ways of disseminating and processing knowledge around this context. Finally, we will compile our experience and accumulated knowledge in the form of problems and challenges at the border between computer science and traditional humanities. These will serve as preparation and assistance for future and current interested parties of such interdisciplinary collaborative project

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

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

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

MusiXplora: Visualizing Geospatial Data in the Musicological Domain

The musiXplora is an interactive and multimodal tool for the domain of musicology, developed in a collaborative and interdisciplinary fashion. It serves as a research environment that, on the one hand, links large data collections on musicians, musical instruments, events and more, and, on the other hand, offers a set of visualizations which allow users to explore and analyze these data sets comprehensively. In this paper, we discuss our recent work to emphasize the relevance of geovisualizations in the musicological domain and provide detailed insights into how the musiXplora can be used to address geospatial research questions. We introduce two distinct use cases and discuss how musicologists can use the musiXplora’s geovisualizations as distant-reading tools. Thereby we demonstrate how the musiXplora can contribute to the confirmation of existing hypotheses and to the formulation of new ones