One word (Figure 1), two (Figure 2), four (Figure 3), or hundreds of them, as in the ‘semantic fields’ and ‘topics’ of Figures 4 and 5. Just two elements: history and semantics. footnote 3 Simplicity, as Rosenberg and Grafton suggest, has certainly helped. Though 80 per cent is high for our corpus, time series are unquestionably very common in dh work, and have thus become its visual ‘signature’. ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture’ includes 33 charts, and 27 of them-80 per cent-are of this kind. A time series, as this type of chart is usually called: the years pass, and the frequency of ‘slavery’ changes it doubles around the Civil War, it slowly declines to its initial frequency, it rises again, more modestly, at the time of the civil rights movement, and so on. Figure 1, opposite, is the first image one encounters in the article, and it sets the tone for all that follows: the horizontal axis measures the passage of time the vertical one, the frequency of the word ‘slavery’. We begin with the article that announced the creation of Google Ngrams, thus catapulting the digital-quantitative approach into the open, well beyond the boundaries of a small academic niche: ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, published in Science in January 2011. Whether this has indeed been the case for dh, is for readers to decide. footnote 1 What interests us is visualization as a practice, in the conviction that practices-what we learn to do by doing, by professional habit, without being fully aware of what we are doing-often have larger theoretical implications than theoretical statements themselves. Whence the idea of this article: to gather sixty-odd studies that have had a significant impact on dh, and analyse how they visually present their data. Field-defining, because visualization is never just visualization: it involves the formation of corpora, the definition of data, their elaboration, and often some sort of preliminary interpretation as well. Now they do, and here we examine some premises (unspoken, and often probably unconscious) of this field-defining practice. ten, fifteen years ago, studies of film, music, literature or art didn’t use any of these. Histograms, scatterplots, time series, diagrams, networks. I f there is one feature that immediately distinguishes the digital humanities ( dh) from the ‘other’ humanities, data visualization has to be it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |