Data Beyond Vision

Data visualization is frequently used in Digital Humanities for exploration, analysis, to make an argument, or to grapple with large-scale data. Increasing access to off-the-shelf data visualization tools is beneficial to the field, but it can lead to facile and homogenized visualizations.

Data physicalization can be used to defamiliarize and refresh the insight that data visualizations initially brought to DH. Proliferation in 3D modeling software and relatively affordable 3D printing technology makes iterative, computer-generated data physicalization more feasible. Working in three dimensions gives additional affordances: parallel data series can be seen next to each other, rather than color-coded, overlapped, or staggered; and physical objects can be viewed from multiple angles, allowing for changing perspective.

Data visualization necessarily privileges sight. Explorations into other senses, such as data sonification and physicalization provide new venues of experience. Touch is particularly significant, since it is the only meta-sense other than sight and because of the intimacy it affords, per the thought of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Multimodal data explorations incorporating touch and sound can provide new possibilities of accessibility to those with low vision (for example, see the

#DataViz4theBlind

project). Spatial, acoustic, and temporal dimensions of data representation can generate rich narratives, invite the audience to explore new relationships, and turn passive consumption into a sensory experience that encourages interpretation, and challenge the reductive nature of data visualization. In addition, creating data physicalizations can be a form of critical making; the iterative and reflective process requires more time to engage with the data, including the human aspects represented.

As an alternative approach to the rhetoric of “building” or “making” that has become common in DH, we are inspired by the work of Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, who encourage a reorientation toward the emotional and affective qualities in our engagement with data. In employing physicalization as a technique to corporealize and “re-humanize” humanities data, we follow the ethical principles articulated by the Colored Conventions Project to “contextualize and narrate the conditions of the people who appear as ‘data’ and to name them when possible.”

We propose a multi-media installation consisting of data physicalization objects and dynamic displays to be exhibited at the conference poster session concurrently with an explanatory poster. Pieces in the installation will utilize space, time, and/or interaction to provide new ways of engaging with a dataset and the arguments and narratives behind it, in order to challenge the dominant paradigms of conventional screen-based data visualization. Each piece will have an accompanying statement on the poster documenting the humanities data and projects it draws on and the significance or insights of the design. Pieces will be designed as much as possible to accommodate display in a space alongside the poster. If individual pieces are unable to be transported to or exhibited at the poster session, the poster will still serve as a proxy for understanding the ways they subvert traditional paradigms of data visualization.

Provisional list of pieces:

experience a well-known work of philosophy through a threaded representation of citation networks and references woven on a loom.
interact with a physical manifestation of membership data for a famous lending library by pulling apart its two main archival sources in three dimensions.
discover patterns in borrowing activity of lesser-known members of the same library by folding printed data into a paper model.