Week 5- Graphic Displays of Gothic France

Reading Johanna Drucker’s “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” made me appreciate the highly nuanced application of information visualization in the humanities.  This article serves as a “call to action,” in a way, asking the reader to reconsider the ideological ramifications of un-modified graphical display in humanities research.  Drucker explains throughout how “data” can be altered, from the traditional method of statistical presentation, so that it responsibly represents the humanities scholarship behind it.  One of conceptual shifts brought up is the notion that all data must be “reconceived” as capta (2).  Drucker goes on to explain that “capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed” (2).  The two verbs “taken” and “given” bring up notions of how the information perceived.  For me, it brought up the notion of is this information a product of reading “in-between the lines” (taken) or simply reading the “lines” (given). The difference between the two terms broadens when considering the purpose of “humanistic inquiry,” which Drucker explains to be deeply rooted in the “(acknowledgment of)  the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production” (2).  In thinking of humanities “data” as something which is a product of careful “construction,” it raises the stakes of how to construct and present this data.  While graphics seem to err on a side of design simplicity, simplicity is a main culprit in giving out a reductive or misleading message.

I was intrigued by the example presented in the Figure 2 bar chart and this got me thinking about how data visualizations are used to guide the viewer through information.  This particular bar chart is highly unconventional because its points spill out of the bars in a gradient-like fashion. This display is used to convey a departure from the binary in graph and thus allows for a depiction of flow, cultural difference, and personal interpretation of the question asked.  As Drucker explains that this allows the information to “(shift) from self-evident ‘fact’ to constructed interpretation motivated by a human agenda” (6).

The element of human interpretation is perhaps what guides the individual through information visualization.  This made me think of the project, Mapping Gothic France.  Based out of Columbia and Vasser, the project is a multimedia database which seeks to guide the user through 12th and 13th century France, particularly its ecclesiastical architecture, through space, time, and narrative.  Although data visualization, through form of charts and interactive maps, is only part of the project, what captured my attention the most when re-examining the site was thinking of each “pathway” (space, time and narrative) as a greater information visualization with bias. For example, most of the energy put into the site is focused on the interoperation of space, rather than time and narrative.  This perhaps alines the function of the site with its title, “Mapping Gothic France,” as it is much easier to access the presentation of spatial information on the site than any other kind of information.  The definition of scope is perhaps also a key to success when presenting humanities data.

Reading this article left me with even more questions about how data visualizations are made, used, and read.  As my post is running over in length, I am curious to know what other people think of the graphical displays on Mapping Gothic France through the lens of Drucker’s article!