After decades of digitization, large cultural heritage collections have emerged on the web, which contain massive stocks of content from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This increase in digital cultural heritage data promises new modes of analysis and increased levels of access for academic scholars and casual users alike. Going beyond the standard representations of search-centric and grid-based interfaces, a multitude of approaches has recently started to enable visual access to cultural collections, and to explore them as complex and comprehensive information spaces by the means of interactive visualizations. In contrast to conventional web interfaces, we witness a widening spectrum of innovative visualization types specially designed for rich collections from the cultural heritage sector. This new class of information visualizations gives rise to a notable diversity of interaction and representation techniques while lending currency and urgency to a discussion about principles such as serendipity, generosity, and criticality in connection with visualization design. With this survey, we review information visualization approaches to digital cultural heritage collections and reflect on the state of the art in techniques and design choices. We contextualize our survey with humanist perspectives on the field and point out opportunities for future research.

Over the last two decades, data visualisation has diffused into the broader realm of mass communication. Before this shift, tools and displays of data-driven geographic- and information visualisation were mostly used in expert contexts. By now, they are also used in casual contexts, for example on newspaper websites, government data portals and many other public outlets. This diversification of the audience poses new challenges within the visualisation community. In this paper we propose personal relevance as one factor to be taken into account when designing casual data visualisations, which are meant for the communication with non-experts. We develop a conceptual model and present a related set of design techniques for interactive web-based visualisations that are aimed at activating personal relevance. We discuss our proposed techniques by applying them to a use case on the visualisation of air pollution in London (UK).

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The present article describes museum4punkt0, a three‐year project that develops and evaluates digital communication applications and technologies in museums. This project, held on a nationwide scale and funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, or BKM), aims to document and analyse the development process, encourages collaboration, and transfers workflows to the museum field that have their origin in disciplines such as design, Human‐Computer Interaction (HCI), or software development. I will first contextualise museum4punkt0, and then explain its overall structure, which includes an overview of the participating institutions and their specific use cases. This will be followed by a description of the ways in which collaboration, documentation, and reflection were devised to ensure that the project's main objectives are reached, in particular, the development and evaluation of innovative digital applications that can be reused in other institutions. Finally, I will discuss the (changing) role of digital technologies and research in museums, and highlight recent developments that bring the Humanities, communication technologies, computational methods, and adjacent fields together.

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