Digital Humanities

Currently, visualization in the humanities uses techniques drawn largely from the social sciences, business applications, and the natural sciences, all of which require self-conscious criticality in their adoption. Such visual displays, including graphs and charts, may present themselves as objective even unmediated views of reality, rather than a rhetorical constructs.

Visualizations in the Digital Humanities takes several different forms. of which are evaluated in terms of the rhetoric of information design and display:

1. The expression of quantifiable or quantitative information in graphic form, such as bar and pie chart.
2. Visualizations of data derived from large-scale data sets such as social networks, digitized corpora, and demographic data.
3. Experiential visualization uses movement through the time and space of a three-dimensional world as the primary mode of engagement such as creating a Chinese ancient relics or the Roman Forum

Visualization has the power to unleash imaginative and conceptual potential. As with so many aspects of digital work, these technologies are intertwined with traditional methods. Knowing what and how to read the visualized forms is at the basis of digital literacy and the assessment of meaning in there new formats.

SOURCE: Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Pressner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Massachuetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities