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

Visualization Types

Johanna then went through showed the typology we are working with:

• Facsimiles are visual
• XML markup also has visual features, as do word processing views
• Charts, Graphs, Maps, Timelines
• 3D renderings, Augmented realities, Simulations
• Imaging techniques out of material sciences

Graphical Activators

She talked about graphical primitives and how we need to be systematic about the graphical and interactive features we can play with. What can we do with different primitives? What would blurring mean? What happens when we add animation/movement, interactivity, sound?

With all these graphical features, then the question is how can we combine the activators with interpretative principles.

Using the 3rd Dimension as Interpretation

She then talked about how we can use additional dimensions to add interpretation. She showed some rich examples of how a chart could be sliced and projected. We can distort to produce perspectives. The graphical manipulation lets us engage with the data visually. You can do anamorphic mapping that lets us see the data differently.

She then talked about perspectivization – when you add a perspective to the points. You dimensionalize the data. You add people to the points. Can we use iconography?

She showed ideas for different problems like the hairball problem. She showed ideas for how visualizations that are linked can affect each other. She showed ideas for the too much Twitter problem.

She talked about the problem of how to connect different ideological taxonomies for time like biblical and scientific time without collapsing them? How can we show the points of contact without reducing one to the other?

She then talked about the issue of generalizability. Can we generalize the ideas she has been working with? How can we humanize the presentation of data? Can we deconstruct visualizations?

Some of the questions and discussion after her talk touched on:

• To what extent are visualizations culturally specific?
• Does adding more graphical features not just add more of the same? Does it really challenge the visualization or does it add humanistic authority?
• How is adding more dimensions a critique of display rather than just more display?
• We talked about the time of making the visualization and the time of the unfolding of the visualization.
• We talked about how time can represent something or model something.
• Can we imagine games of making visualizations? How does the making of the visualization constitute a visualization? Can a way of making visualizations be more useful?
• How can any visualization have the APIs to be connected to physical controls and physical materializations?

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.

…

In his initial message to me, Christoph emphasised the need for the project to have a visual identity. On 14 March 2016, he wrote:

I’ve just started a new research project for which we need a visual identity – and this time that’s doubly important as the project itself is about visualization.

Moreover, the design needed to reflect the ambitions of the project as articulated in Johanna’s latest book:

[I’m looking for] a suitable logo idea that can serve to highlight what Johanna so aptly emphasizes in “Graphesis”: the importance of thinking about visualizations as a genuine epistemic and explorational device rather than a mere representational instance of ‘data’.

To illustrate what a successful design might look like, he cited a drawing reproduced in the book:

I came across Johanna’s mention of Kandinsky’s “From Point and Line to Plane” on p.35 in “Graphesis” and was immediately attracted by Fig.98 in the right hand margin: For me the vertical line touching the upper border signifies a subtle transgression of the idea of visually supported dualism as it pulls the reference plane within the square and that of the perceiver notionally situated outside the square (if you wish, the discourse plane) together and brings them into contact.

I accepted the job and set to work.

Identity design is in large measure typography, and typography is often a good starting point when creating a new logo. For this project I decided to start from the genre of decorative typefaces known as ‘shaded,’ as these invoke a sense of 3-dimensionality.

I also noticed a possible connection between the design brief and a peculiarity of the 3DH acronym. I knew enough of Johanna and Geoffrey’s work to understand that the phrase ‘epistemic and explorational’ in Christoph’s brief related to their conviction that interfaces and visualisations should be re-conceived to facilitate interpretation as their primary affordance; at the same time the D in the 3DH seemed to invite, if not require, interpretation due to its indeterminacy. I wrote on 16 March 2016 at 12:04 hrs:

As design briefs go, the above requirement is definitely one of the tougher assignments I’ve seen.¶ I wonder if it could be solved through a bit of playfulness. Let’s start with the project name: 3DH. There’s a quibble to be had from this name as to whether the 3D or the DH part should be the privileged reading: the D is ambiguous, therefore in need of interpretation.

I proposed a series of four typographic markers based on this idea, using the colours black and red to delimit the 3D and the DH groupings, with the fourth piece in the series separating the two colours in a diagonal division running through the letter D:

Johanna responded to this design by bringing up the concept of parallax, the displacement in the apparent position of an object viewed along different lines of sight, which she had discussed previously in some of her published work. In this work she asserts that through visualisations implementing the concept, it will be possible for value, identity, and relation of temporal events to be ‘expressed as a set of conditions, rather than givens’. She wrote on 16 March 2016, 13:24 hrs:

I’m wondering if the concept of parallax could be built in here to go “beyond representational concepts of visualization”.¶ Unfortunately, most diagrams of parallax are pretty reductive. But if you could imagine the 3DH logo you’re playing with constructed from two points of view or scales and have them not match but still relate–sort of like extending that diagonal slice through the D in the fourth version of the logo, but so that it refracts the letters. I would suggest lightening the design as well so it is not quite so solid/architectonic.

She illustrated her idea with a number of hand-drawn and scanned sketches, collated into a single PDF.

A diagram consisting of conceptual space mapped out by thin lines and inhabited by typographic elements at comparatively small size is in danger of looking ethereal and anaemic at small scales, especially when displayed next to more conventional logotypes.

On 21 March 2016 at 15:19 hrs, Johanna conceded that her diagrammatic approach would be susceptible to the scaling issue, yet she suggested that there might be a way to merge our separate approaches into in a single design:

I wonder if we can work with that ambiguity and an indication of non-identity or non-similarity between the two meanings of the “D” in the acronym. That could introduce the parallax issue in some way.

I frankly didn’t know how to act on this suggestion, so I tried a variation on the D that faces two ways. I understood that both Johanna and Geoffrey were opposed to anything ‘Cartesian’, so central perspective was out of the question. My suggestion made use of a roughly cobbled-together axonometric projection, about which I wrote, on 22 March 2016 at 11:48 hrs:

Attached as well is another take on the same idea expressed in a 3×5 pixel font rendered 3D in axonometric projection (channelling my inner Max Bill here). The piece turns on the ‘ambiguity’ of the D again, as the letter associates with the 3 in its orientation but associates with the H in its colour.

Christoph was intrigued by the piece, and he wrote on 22 March 2016 at 12:53 hrs:

it creates a weird Escher-like paradoxical n-dimensionality that loops onto itself and makes it, how shall I put it, “performative” in that you simply cannot stop re-processing the image.

He encouraged me to pursue the idea further, but Johanna, as I had anticipated from her critique of my initial offering as too ‘solid/architectonic’, was unconvinced. She urged a change of approach on 22 March 2016 at 13:07 hrs:

We might consider using the positive/negative space instead of closing the forms

Playing on positive/negative space, unlike the parallax idea, was something I knew how to handle. I wasn’t very keen on the idea because it seemed to offer less scope for the play on the letter D, but I pursued the idea anyway, resulting in a few iterations that struck me as nicely done but showing little relevance to the design brief.

Meanwhile, Johanna had been at work trying to bring about the merger of our separate starting ideas that she had hinted at. She wrote on 23 March 2016:

I’m going back to your sliced “D” idea and seeing if I can play with some parallax in it.

She supplied a sketch with two drawings:

Johanna’s drawings were a welcome occasion to drop the ‘negative space’ idea. They reminded me that a few days earlier my preoccupation with ‘shaded’ typefaces had led me to look at fonts constructed as impossible objects, a typographic genre often associated with the name of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who may have done most to popularise such objects. I wrote on 24 March 2016 at 22:29 hrs:

I returned to a few recent Escher-inspired retail typefaces and examined them under the aspect of whether the two yoked-together perspectival components of the D might be coloured different to convey the ‘ambiguity’ of the letter. I put this through a few iterations until it occurred to me that I could vectorise Johanna’s D sketch and use it in the same fashion.¶ Which I did as a rough and ready first cut.¶ Please find the whole series also included in the zip. Don’t worry about the grey/white/yellow colour scheme just yet.¶ I think we have a candidate here.

The attachment included two pieces that would form the basis of the eventual design.

This batch of pieces was well received. Johanna wrote on 24 March 2016 at 22:45 hrs:

Oooohhhhh! I am really loving these. I have my favorites, but will hold off until others weigh in. SUPER!!! We are really getting close, I think. Elegant, too!!

Christoph wrote on 25 March 2016 at 06:04 hrs:

Wow, Rudolf,¶ this is really a leap forward!

Things took a curious turn at this juncture: Johanna never came back to name her favourites among the Escher batch, whereas Christoph and I focused on the version of the design using Jeremia Adatte’s Bron Black typeface. Oddly, we both shared the concern that the 3 character looked like Homer Simpson‘s face, and that it required a modification to its shape. I also developed an obsession with searching for ‘impossible object’ typefaces and, telling myself I was doing my due diligence, went through as many such typefaces as I could find. And it occurred to me that we could bake the yin and yang motif into the design by not just making the D the location where the two colours cross over from one to the other; in addition, both of the other characters could have their respective main colour counterpointed by a small included segment of the opposite colour.

The work now seemed nearly completed. Christoph wrote on 26 March 2016 at 1:36 hrs:

I think we’re about to reach design freeze!

Johanna agreed, writing on 26 March 2016 at 15:38:

This has been REALLY fun! And so fast!

However, still unresolved was the question of what the colours would be. One possibility, perhaps the obvious one, was to rely on shading, which is conventionally used to evoke the physicality of a three-dimensional object in two dimensions; we could render the design in a local colour and a corresponding shaded hue.

Christoph had another idea. He wrote on 29 March 2016 at 12:48 hrs:

I have to consider internal politics and strategy: I would appreciate if we could either use Hamburg University’s color scheme (see https://www.uni-hamburg.de/) or one that resembles that of the City of Hamburg (which includes blue: see http://www.hamburg.de/). These are my funders who I need to get on board as co-owners and I want to make sure that they, too, will be able to identify with our project.

I objected to the adoption of Hamburg’s colour scheme, but Christoph insisted and asked for a draft of the logo, so he could attach it to a mailing to the project funders at the end of the week. In response to this request I started to look for ways to colour the design red and blue.

We seemed to have arrived at the end of the process now. Yet by that point I also nurtured a growing sense of dissatisfaction. It vexed me that we were merely going to apply a minor tweak to a typeface and to play a game with colours that seemed too clever by half while failing to state the design’s basic idea with any clarity or forcefulness.

Why weren’t we using Johanna’s D drawing, which was our own original creation? If anything, I wanted that drawing back! With due apologies for the very late about-face, I lamented on 30 Mar 2016 at 16:27 hrs:

instead of building further on the piece with Johanna’s unique drawing, uniquely connected to the project, we went for a generic, commercially available revival of a nineteen-seventies typeface

I attached a few revisions of the earlier piece.

To accommodate Christoph’s wish for Hamburg styling, I adopted the colour scheme specified in the branding guidelines of the City of Hamburg [PDF] and modified the typography. Throughout this project, I had been using the Futura typeface as a nod to the Bauhaus aesthetic, following Christoph’s mention of Kandinsky during the earliest stage of the collaboration. As Universität Hamburg’s branding guidelines specify TheSans of Lucas de Groot’s wonderful Thesis family of typefaces, I happily switched from the geometric sans serif to the humanistic sans serif.

I was apprehensive of the response to my about-face, as the proposal second-guessed what very much seemed like a done deal. However, both Johanna and Christoph supported the change right away. Johanna wrote on 31 March 2016 at 00:56 hrs:

I really love these […] the larger D in the center with the real dimensionality to it is terrific.

Christoph concurred and wrote on 31 March 2016 at at 06:54 hrs:

Escher-Drucker it shall be. It’s leaner, less self-absorbed and elegantly accentuates the dynamic D as a perceptual and intellectual axis.

This version was adopted, then, and made it into the mailing.

With the site coming online in early April, I implemented the logo and the Hamburg colours in a lightly modified version of the content management system’s GeneratePress presentation layer.

And this is how it all got that way.

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.

Types of Visualization in the Humanities

What kinds of visualizations do we use? Johanna Drucker gave a concise overview of the major types of visualizations used in the humanities. Each of these have different visual traditions and relationships to data.

1. Digitizations/remediations of original – These are visualizations that represent an original like a facsimile or a electronic text. They are digital surrogates.
2. Data-driven displays – These don’t represent an original, but represent some abstraction or analysis. Some types might include charts, graphs, maps, and timelines.
3. Visual renderings – These are complex 3D constructions and fantasies that use codes of pictorial representation with little data. They are extrapolations of the data. They augment the data. Some types include 3D renderings, augmented reality and virtual reality. They are often based on minimal data giving the illusion of repleteness.
4. Computationally processed visualizations – These are the special forms of imaging applied to artefacts like manuscripts. They adapt imaging techniques from the material sciences like MRI or x-ray scans.

All of these types of visualizations carry epistemological baggage, often from the sciences, but also from gaming (in the case of renderings.)

Examples

She the showed example images and talked about their limits. We can remediate the already remediated.

• Ben Fry, On The Origin of the Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces. This visualization gives a nice overview of the editing process, but it can be difficult to explore deeper.
• Mapping Gothic France. This site provides a number of different visualizations to help understand gothic churches in France. She showed a visualization from the Comparisons section where you can stack outlines of naves and so on.
• InscriptiFact. A database of images where they have applied imaging techniques to bring out information in inscriptions.

Historical Origins: Imprints of Disciplines

Drucker gave a quick tour through some of the types of visualizations and how they are imprinted with their origins. They carry the baggage of their history of use. We need to understand these histories in order to understand how they will be interpreted or overintepreted.

• The table is one of the earliest and main forms of visualizing data. It is a powerful interpretative tool and we forget how it uses visual arrangement. It is invisible as a visualization.
• The tree (as in tree of life or family tree) has spiritual origins. It bears notions of continuity or, in the case of the tree of life it bears notions of hierarchy. Trees carry structure in subtle ways. Think of the family tree of consanguinity (who can inherit) – showing a mythic notion of inheritance.
• Charts have their origin in political arithmetic. They are a way of showing abstract data from human situations so that people can be managed.

Graphical “language of form”

Drucker then turned to the idea of a “language of form”. The languages of architecture (think Palladio) are a predecessor to the more recent idea of a language of visual form. These languages of form are often used in discussions of information visualization, but they have a history. This idea comes from the aspirations of the visual arts to be as authoritative as the sciences. One of the early attempts to develop such a language is in Humbert de Superville‘s Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l’art. He developed a language from which more complex works can be drawn. Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane 1926 was another attempt that breaks with with 19th century realism, developing a stable graphic language which becomes a foundation of graphic design languages. It is an attempt at an abstract set of signs. She talked about how we can mine the inventory of modern art for ideas. She showed the lino cuts of 1961 of Anton Stankowski whose Functional Graphics look extraordinarily like templates for the visualizations we use today. He imagined ways to make invisible processes visible. She then mentioned how perceptual psychology also developed a language of form trying to find a graphic vocabulary.

Important to data visualization is Jacques Bertin and his Semiology of Graphics. In this he distills 7 graphic variables with which show information: size, tone, texture, color, orientation, shape, and position. Drucker added that in dynamic situation we need to add: motion, rate of motion, direction of motion, and the sound of motion. Graphical systems make use of these variables. They also carry semantic value. As a principle, we should use things for what they are good at showing.

Drucker then showed some types of visualizations that haven’t been used like architectural plans. We don’t use perspective – we obliterate dimensions.
When we leave out perspective we leave the perspective of the speaker out. This creates the illusion that it is as if the visualizations speak for themselves. We also lose the ability to use distortion or translation of perspective.

Another type that we haven’t used is the cabinet of curiosities like Wormius’ one. She talked about the complexity of the image and how much data it carries using perspective, tonal value.

She compared a Moretti graph of Hamlet to a Daniel Maclise painting of the play within the play. She showed a Charneaux lingerie image that shows how lingerie adds structure to the body. She showed a cartoon showing a step by step process. All these to show how impoverished visualizations were.

What is the work of visualizations and what do we want to do

Visualization can be a type of fiction that obscures a lot in order to show an overview or gestalt. Some of the things we want to do include:

• Add dimensions and perspective back – flat screens are lacking
• Translate images through rendering – can we use the visual for what it is good at?
• We want to be shown degrees of certainty.
• Map views can make it look as if the same space is the same – we want to show distortions and how maps are of their time. We want to avoid historical anachronism and use data to build a map rather than structure the data with a map.
• We want to use renderings to hold evidence not to obscure provide illusion of it.

What is the work ahead

Drucker closed by talking about the epistemological issues and graphic challenges ahead.

• Partial knowledge: how do we show what we don’t know – figure without ground
• How can we show evidence and see what shape it takes rather than imposing shape
• How can we situate knowledge – provide a point of view
• How can we be clear about the historical specificity and diverse ontologies
• How can we show process – visual and non-visual
• How can we provide for annotation – commentary and non-visual
• How can we visualize the methodological. How can we show contradiction, incompleteness, doubt, uncertainty, and parallax.
• How can we show non-standard/variable metrics – affective metrics, diverse scales
• How can we make a semantically legible system

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.

The idea is to go beyond visualizations as informative and develop models for exploration and reflection. Meister is fascinated by visualization as something that generates knowledge. Some of the components that have been brought together by 3DH include:

• Lecture series and guest lectures
• A blog (this one) and wiki exchange
• Publications and presentations
• “Proof of concept” implementations
• Taxonomy of visualization tools and models
• Systematic literature review
• Analysis of use cases