DATA VISUALIZATIONSUsing Vision to Think about the Humanities

“The next big idea in language, history and the arts?”

-New York Times, November 16, 2010.

Who has rich data and image sets?

DATA

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS!

Visualization “makes the job of our visual system easier, but it’s not going to explain a pattern. It confronts you with something you wouldn’t notice otherwise, confronts you with new cultural facts. You see things that, probably, nobody has noticed before, new cultural patterns that you now have to explain.”

Lev Manovich . Graphing Culture. Humanities. Spring 2011

“by extracting and graphing this data it will help us understand patterns and explore trends in a painter’s life and work.”

- Lev Manovich

Ben Shneiderman focuses on designing technologies that allow the "visualization of things not visible.” In the early 90’s Scheiderman developed The treemap,

an area-based visualization where the size of each rectangle represents a metric .

Visualizations also can help Cultural Institutions/Organizations gather information about themselves. Here we look at biennale launches in various countries, and can determine the “old cultural countries” from the “young cultural countries.

Imaginary Forces

“Direct visualizations methods will be particularly important for humanities, media studies and cultural institutions which now are beginning to discover the use of visualization, but which eventually may adopt it as a basic tool for research, teaching and exhibition of cultural artifacts.”

“Humanists always focused on analyzing and interpreting details of the cultural objects. This is one of the key differences between humanities and sciences – at least, as they were practiced until now. The former are interested in particular artifacts (which can be taken to exemplify larger trends); the latter are interested in general laws and models.”

- Lev Manovich. Date. What is Visualization?

In a 2009 essay Manovich evoked the term “cultural analytics” “a new paradigm for the study, teaching, and public presentation of cultural artifacts, dynamics, and flows.”

the general idea of cultural analytics is to apply data visualization and analysis techniques traditionally associated with the so-called hard sciences—graphing, mapping, diagramming, and so on—to the study of visual culture.

The conference explored new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as “humanities tools in digital environments.”

“The goal was to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship.”

-Johanna Drucker

Telling the Story with Data

“Information visualization has the potential to transform both museum practice and research in to museum collections.”

“In the museum field, talented individuals have begun to experiment with visualization tools to represent collections, visitors, and a range of other museum activities, using a variety of visualization styles and methods and asking a range of questions about collecting practice, allocation of museum resources, and visitor responses to onsite and online programs.

- Information Visualization and Museum Practice: MCN 2010

techniques borrowed from the digital humanities community have begun to appear in primary research about collection objects. Because of its highly complex (and often visual nature), museum data can represent both new challenges and possibilities for infoviz specialists and for the museum professionals and scholars who are their audiences.”

The Modernist Journals Project: a joint project of Brown University and The University of Tulsa

MJP Lab: Visualizing an Entire Journal: Others

Recommended Visualization ResourcesGraphics Hubs

DIRT: The Digital Research Tools Wiki Information Visualization at the Open Directory Project "List of information graphics software" on wikipedia Visualization and Datamining Software

Individual Sites

Chronos Timeline at the Digital Humanities Hyperstudio at MIT Google Chart Tools Graphviz: Graph Visualization Software Many Eyes at IBM Protovis: A Graphical Toolkit for Visualization SEASR: The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research SIMILE Widgets: Free, Open-Source Data Visualization Web Widgets, and More Voyeur VUE: Visual Understanding Environment at Tufts

- Courtesy of MJP Lab