Johanna Drucker: Visualizing Interpretation: A Report on 3DH

Johanna Drucker gave a special lecture on June 6th that reported on the state of the project and where we are going. She started by giving some history to the 3DH project. We went from “create the next generation of visualizations in the digital humanities?” to a more nuanced goal:

Can we augment current visualizations to better serve humanists and, at the same time, make humanistic methods into systematic visualizations that are useful across disciplines outside the humanities?

She commented that there is no lack of visualizations, but most of them have their origins in the sciences. Further, evidence and argument get collapsed in visualization, something we want to tease apart. In doing this, can we create a set of visualization conventions that make humanities methods useful to other disciplines? Some of the things important to the humanities that we want to make evidence include: partial evidence, situated knowledge, and complex and non-singular interpretations.

Project development is part of what we have been focusing on. We have had to ask ourselves “what is the problem?” We had to break the problem down, agree on practices, frame the project, and sketch ideas.

Johanna talked about how we ran a charette on what was outside the frame. She showed some of the designs. Now we have a bunch of design challenges for inside the frame. One principle we are working with is that a visualization can’t be only data driven. There has to be a dialogue between the graphical display and the data. Thus we can have visualization driven data and vice versa.

We broke the tasks down to:

  • Survey visualization types
  • Study pictorial conventions
  • Create graphical activators
  • Propose some epistemological / hermeneutical dimensions
  • Use three dimensionality
  • Apply to cases
  • Consider generalizability

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The Making of: The 3DH Logo and How it Got That Way

3dh-threedees

In mid-March this year, I was contacted by Prof Christoph Meister of Universität Hamburg, with whom I had previously collaborated on the re-branding of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH). He wanted a logo for the 3DH project.

In the course of the following two weeks, I engaged in an intensive email exchange with the 3DH team and Profs Johanna Drucker and Geoffrey Rockwell, both of whom are visiting professors in Hamburg this summer term as part of the 3DH project. By the end of the month, we had worked out a logo design that everybody considered a success.

The following timeline is a collage of discussion fragments, logo sketches and drafts that passed back and forth in an ad-hoc collaboration conducted entirely via email; the timeline seeks to document the main ideas that guided the collaboration and to capture a sense of the process by which we arrived at the final design as displayed on this site now.

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Johanna Drucker: 3DH

Johanna Drucker gave the third lecture in the 3DH series. She talked about 3 dimensional digital humanities and how she conceives of the road ahead of us. She started with the goal of the project:

To develop a conceptual blueprint for next generation digital humanities visualizations.

What would that mean? How can we do it? To do this we need to understand where we are and where we have to go and her talk did that by touching on:

  1. How visualizations have an imprinted form of argument that comes from their origins.
  2. Understand ideas about languages of form – ideas about how one can systematize the visual.
  3. Look at how contemporary DH people use visualizations and what work do they want them to do.
  4. Understand conventions of pictorial imagery and how most visualizations are pictorially impoverished.
  5. Identify the epistemological challenges ahead.

She noted that 3DH is focusing on the visualizations of humanities documents and humanistic inquiry. Humanists are engaged in the production, interpretation, and preservation of human record. We need to think about problems of our practices like interpretation.

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3DH Introduction by Meister

The 3DH project was launched on April 6th with an introduction by Jan Christopher Meister and a first lecture by Erik Champion (see next entry).

Chris Meister introduced the 3DH project by talking about the title (Three-Dimensional Dynamic Data) and the design process that led to the visual identity. The goal of the project is to,

Establish a methodological and theoretical orientation as well as to develop prototypes of visualization tools as demonstrators.

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