Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

Abstract

Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data should bring order and insight, reveal patterns and provide leads for new research questions. However, simple two-dimensional visualizations are often too static and too generic to meet these needs. Visualization tools for the humanities should be able to deal with the observer dependency, heterogeneity, uncertainty and provenance of data and the complexity of humanities research questions. They should furthermore offer scholars the opportunity to interactively manipulate their data sets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Storyteller, an open source visualization tool designed to interactively explore complex data sets for the humanities. We present the tool, and demonstrate its applicability in three very different humanities projects.

GRaSP: Grounded Representation and Source Perspective

“…Nevertheless, current methods can provide output that we believe to be useful for researchers interested in perspectives. In this section, we illustrate what information can currently be generated by NLP tools through a dataset that the GRaSP framework for representation made available through an interface providing an open source visualization (van der Zwaan et al, 2016;van Meersbergen et al, 2017).…”

Uncertainty in humanities network visualization

“…Nevertheless, all information contains uncertainty, normally of multiple kinds (MacEachren et al, 2012). Uncertainty is, however, hard to represent in data models and derivative visualizations (Kessels and van Bree, 2017); thus, uncertainty tends to be underemphasized in visualizations and visualizationdriven disciplines (Ciuccarelli, 2014;Van der Zwaan et al, 2016). In this article, we consider the kinds of uncertainty most relevant to networks in the digital humanities, as well as some of the visual variables that can be used to represent uncertainty.…”