Introduction
Visualization is an important and often overlooked aspect of digital research. Choosing the best tool for the type of data you are working with will have a significant impact on your project. For example, types of data in the humanities might include data gleaned from primary texts, historical artifacts, maps, and demographics data from census and survey results. Common types of visualization include graphs, charts, tree diagrams, timelines, infographics, maps, and more. The appropriate tool can help researchers identify patterns in the artifacts they are analyzing and help create a narrative for your audience. This page offers a few examples of books and Open Source tools to help humanities scholars get started with visualization.
Books
Beautiful Evidence by Call Number: General Collection P93.5 .T837 2006ISBN: 0961392177Publication Date: 2008-05-01Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information. Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence presentations.
The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge by Call Number: General Collection P93.5 .L56 2017ISBN: 9781616895280Publication Date: 2017-05-02In this follow-up to his hugely popular The Book of Trees and Visual Complexity, Manuel Lima takes us on a lively tour through millennia of circular information design.
The Book of Trees by Call Number: OnlineISBN: 1616892188Publication Date: 2014-04-08Our critically acclaimed bestsellerVisual Complexity was the first in-depth examination of the burgeoning field of information visualization.
Cartographies of Time by Call Number: ARC General Collection D11.5 .R64 2010ISBN: 1568987633Publication Date: 2010-03-03What does history look like? How do you draw time? From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time.
Infographics Designers' Sketchbooks by Call Number: General Collection P93.5 .H454 2014ISBN: 9781616892869Publication Date: 2014-10-14We are living in a golden age of data visualization, in which designers are responding to the information overload of our digital era with astonishing feats of visual thinking.
Storytelling with Data by Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9781119002253Publication Date: 2015-11-02Even though this is geared toward business professions, it had some valuable information and ideas for scholars in any field about how to visualize and present their data. Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story.
Tools
- CanvaAn online publishing platform that allows users to make a variety of simple visualizations such as infographics and reports using clean, pre-loaded designs.
- RAWGraphsOpen-source software that allows users to input data from CSV files, pick and customize pre-loaded designs, and export completed visualizations.
- Timeline JSA free, easy-to-use platform that allows users to make interactive timelines that are visually engaging. Users can create timelines with basic knowledge of Google Sheets or more advanced knowledge of JSON.
- Visual EyesA visualization and publishing tool developed by scholars for weaving interactive maps, charts, and video into dynamic visualizations.
Further Reading
- Humanities approaches to graphical displayAs digital humanists have adopted visualization tools in their work, they have borrowed methods developed for the graphical display of information in the natural and social sciences. These tools carry with them assumptions of knowledge as observer-independent and certain, rather than observer co-dependent and interpretative. This paper argues that we need a humanities approach to the graphical expression of interpretation.
- Information Visualization for Humanities ScholarsInformation visualization for humanities scholars needs to accommodate a mix of evidence and argumentation. The humanities approach consists not of converging toward a single interpretation that cannot be challenged but rather of examining the objects of study from as many reasonable and original perspectives as possible to develop convincing interpretations.