Thursday 21 January 2016

Article in Visible Language: Idea and Image of Historical Time

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