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VIW6

Inspiring Visualizing Interpretations Workshop with Johanna Drucker

By Kurt Fendt on May 7, 2012

From 23-28 April 2012, Johanna Drucker, professor of information studies at UCLA and well-known theorist of digital humanities, led a series of workshop sessions that engaged more then 20 participants in discussingapproaches to data visualization in the humanities. The workshop, titled “Visualizing Interpretation,” asked major questions that humanists face when working in the digital terrain: How can we create digital models that incorporate ways of knowing that are unique to the humanities? What are the issues facing the longevity and sustainability of digital projects in the humanities? What new opportunities and intellectual tasks do increasingly larger scale data sets present us with? As Drucker summarized the workshop’s questions: “What do humanists need to do our business digitally? And what do humanistic methods and values bring to digital work—and why does that matter?”

The workshop examined these issues from many angles, including problems of visualization, the use of scale, and working with large data sets. In order to ground the discussion in real-world conditions, the workshop revolved around the case study of a real-world design problem: a digital platform, combining archival and social-media features, for use in a course on the cultural history of Los Angeles that will be taught in a future semester at UCLA. The larger goal in developing such a site, Drucker said, is to think about how to create a sustainable set of tools that can be repurposed by other scholars: “What kind of combinatorial, modular environment can we create that will not go out of date? What kind of environment will support this?”

Design sketches and further results from the workshop will be posted here shortly.

Text by Elyse Graham and Jia Zhang.

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Talk: Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, May 10, 12:30 pm Pound Hall, Room 100, Harvard Law School

By Kurt Fendt on May 10, 2011

From the announcement by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel:

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

About the speakers:

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 “Biotech Breakthroughs that will Change Medicine”, by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society’s Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review’s 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers – two with JB Michel – have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science.

Jean-Baptiste Michel is FQEB Fellow at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google. With Erez Lieberman Aiden, he founded the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where their team develops quantitative approaches to the humanities and social sciences. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique, and received an MS in Applied Math and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

Repertoire Chronos Demo

Visualizing Visual Interpretations

By Anna van Someren on July 2, 2010

with Dave Della Costa and Kurt Fendt

How to visualize a conference on visual interpretations?

After all the exciting talks, presentations, conversations, and Tweets at the humanities + digital conference on Visual Interpretations in May and the great feedback we received afterward, we at HyperStudio were wondering how to process and present this information. Our idea was to figure out a way to represent the whole conference, including the program schedule, presentation abstracts, and Twitter feeds, in a visually appealing way. One way to begin quickly surfaced: why not use our own Chronos Timeline to visualize the whole conference in a time-based manner?

Chronos, developed by HyperStudio’s software engineers Brett Barros and Dave Della Costa, has been conceived as a flexible web application that can be integrated into several of our projects. For example, below is a short video displaying Chronos within our US-Iran Relations Project. This project brings scholars and policymakers from both countries together to explore the period following the Islamic revolution in Iran and consider why improvements in bilateral relations did not occur. To facilitate this exploration, we’re creating a collaborative, multilingual research environment that allows scholars and policymakers to explore thousands of original documents from Mohammed Khatemi’s presidency in Iran and to compare and contrast views of events. Below you can see how Chronos displays a subset of events during the Iran-Iraq war, along with related tags, providing a multidimensional way to explore a data set.

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Timeline Visualizations: A Brief and Incomplete Teleological History (Part 2)

By Whitney Anne Trettien on February 15, 2010

Recently, I looked at the origins of the timeline in eighteenth-century information visualization. Today: the nineteenth century and Charles Minard.

Minard was a French civil engineer, known today almost entirely for his Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l”Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813 (1869). Perhaps the first flow map ever produced, this elegant yet simple graphic visualizes human movement across time and space, correlating the number of troops and their location to temperature, represented by the line at the bottom of the chart.

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