Teaching on the Intersection of Visualization and Digital Humanities

Abstract

Visualization as a means to generate hypotheses and to communicate insights on digitized cultural heritage data sets has become more and more important in the recent years. While many digital humanities researchers transform their data in order to be processed with ready-to-use tools, others engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with visualization scholars aiming to design novel solutions and interactive visual interfaces as occurring data features are more carefully mapped to visual attributes. Many of those collaborations suffer from loss of time at the beginning of the project as scholars with diverse research backgrounds require to understand each others' mindsets, ways of thinking and research interests. This paper reports on three years of teaching visualization design for digital humanities projects. It provides an overview of theoretical course contents, practical training, collaboration setups-involving computer science, digital humanities as well as humanities students who experienced typical collaboration obstacles-and remarkable project results.