W5 – Information Visualization Cont. & The Refugee Project

In “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Johanna Drucker suggests that we “rethink the foundation of the way data are conceived as capta by shifting its terms from certainty to ambiguity and find graphical means of expressing interpretive complexity.” She begins her paper by differentiating between “capta” (knowledge constructed through interpretive processes) and data (that which is observed and recorded). For her, the problem with information visualizations in the field of digital humanities is that they render capta as if it were data. She writes, “the digital humanities can no longer afford to take its tools and methods from disciplines whose fundamental epistemological assumptions are at odds with humanistic method.”

 

She proposes several approaches for representing the temporality of time and space in visualizations. Her modifications to a bar chart showing the number of new novels put into print by a single publisher in the years 1855-1862 (Fig. 3) is notable because it displays so much more than just numbers. It displays publication data in relation to the time of writing, acquisition, editing, pre-press work, release, etc. with color-coded timeline elements superimposed on the time axis. In this way, it presents the interpretive process behind the information displayed. However, non-traditional representations such as this add extra layers of complexity to information visualizations. Although this example is pretty straightforward – only one publication year is broken down into it’s relational components – things can get ugly quickly. Imagine a large data set displayed like this or like Fig. 9. There comes a point when Drucker’s approach confuses the reader and impedes their understanding of the information, which opposes the purpose of information visualization in the first place. In this way, there will always be a tradeoff between representing information in a way that conveys its true nature and context and representing information in a way that is easily understandable to the reader.

 

refugee_project_2

 

The Refugee Project ( http://www.therefugeeproject.org ) is an interactive, narrative, temporal map of refugee migrations since 1975. “UN data is complemented by original histories of the major refugee crises of the last four decades, situated in their individual contexts.” This visualization is a great example of information rendered in a way that is simple to understand, yet multi-faceted and descriptive in nature. The map view displays numbers of refugees per country (represented by circles of various sizes) and where they fled to (on mouse hover). Statistics and quantitative information are linked to historical events with narrative information. In addition, there is a timeline feature for the map and different view options (country of origin/country of asylum, refugees/[refugees/population]). Although the people are in the end treated as numbers, The Refugee Project does an excellent job of presenting “the big picture.”