Final-year PhD student
Florian Kräutli and I have recently published
a paper in Visible Language looking at some issues in visualising historic data – especially legacy data belonging to institutions.
The paper addresses the relationship between design and the digital humanities, asking what each can learn from the other and how they may make progress together. The focus is critical making in chronographics — the time-wise visualisation of history — based on the authors’ historic research and current practice in visualising collections of cultural objects and events. This is situated in historic and contemporary contexts, arguing that the eighteenth century origins of the modern timeline have useful insights to offer in terms of objectives and rationale. The authors advocate a critical approach to visualisation that requires both design and digital humanities to face up to the problems of uncertainty, imprecision, and curatorial process, including in relation to time itself.
The whole issue (49:3 December 2015) of the journal is
Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities. It was ably guest-edited by
Jessica Barness and
Amy Papaelias. Here is the table of contents:
- GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
- Critical Making at the Edges Jessica Barness, Amy Papaelias
- THEORY AND SPECULATIONS
- Meta!Meta!Meta! A Speculative Design Brief for the Digital Humanities Anne Burdick
- Clues. Anomalies. Understanding. Detecting underlying assumptions and expected practices in the Digital Humanities through the AIME project Donato Ricci, Robin de Mourat, Christophe Leclercq, Bruno Latour
- Writing Images and the Cinematic Humanities Holly Willis
- Beyond the Map: Unpacking Critical Cartography in the Digital Humanities Tania Allen, Sara Queen
- FORMS AND OBJECTS
- The Idea and Image of Historical Time: Interactions between Design and Digital Humanities Stephen Boyd Davis, Florian Kräutli
- Critical Interfaces and Digital Making Steve Anderson
- Making Culture: Locating the Digital Humanities in India Padmini Ray Murray, Chris Hand
- Prototyping the Past Jentery Sayers
- visual book review + essay: Book Art: a Critical Remix of The Electric Information Age Book Steven McCarthy
