Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
Bibliography
Drucker, J. (n.d.). Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.
Abstract
As digital humanists have adopted visualization tools in their work, they have borrowed methods developed for the graphical display of information in the natural and social sciences. These tools carry with them assumptions of knowledge as observer-independent and certain, rather than observer co-dependent and interpretative. This paper argues that we need a humanities approach to the graphical expression of interpretation. To begin, the concept of data as a given has to be rethought through a humanistic lens and characterized as capta, taken and constructed. Next, the forms for graphical expression of capta need to be more nuanced to show ambiguity and complexity. Finally, the use of a humanistic approach, rooted in a codependent relation between observer and experience, needs to be expressed according to graphics built from interpretative models. In summary: all data have to be understood as capta and the conventions created to express observer-independent models of knowledge need to be radically reworked to express humanistic interpretation.
Notes
Notes
Go to annotation“This paper argues that we need a humanities approach to the graphical expression of interpretation.” (Drucker, p. 1)
Go to annotation“To begin, the concept of data as a given has to be rethought through a humanistic lens and characterized as capta, taken and constructed.” (Drucker, p. 1)
To counteract the problems of a realist approach to visual representation and analysis we need to think of data, the foundation of visualizations, as capta. Capta are taken, not given to us. They are constructed by us, not an objective thing about the world.
Go to annotation“From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of preexisting fact.” (Drucker, p. 2)
The problem is within the reception of data viz as something objective and true. By taking over practices of the natural sciences and administrative/statistic practices, we need to reintroduce the humanities approach of seing knowledge as constructed.
Go to annotation“Data as capta: from information visualization to graphical expressions of interpretation” (Drucker, p. 3)
Visualizations are a way of hiding away the messiness of reality, of what was measured. The author states three explicit criqitues to counteract that impuls:
- humanistic approach
- embody qualitative expressions
- graphically constitutedness
She then goes on to demonstrates those critique on an bar-chart example.
Go to annotation“Creating bar charts with ambiguity and degrees of uncertainty or other variables in them might cause champions of legibility and transparency some unease, but the shift away from standard metrics to metrics that express interpretation is an essential move for humanists and/or constructivists across disciplines.” (Drucker, p. 6)
The author calls for a radical expression of subjectivness in data visualizations. Here I’m wondering, how this relates to the principles of information design that Tufte came up with. That is, the approach of capta and subjectiveness don’t take reception (as in legibility) into account.
Drucker championed an approach where visual spaces could be epistemology, with her Temporal Modelling project. She shows several examples on how time can be mapped and visualized according to her principles laid out earlier.
She goes to propose principles in arriving at solutions to her critiques:
Go to annotation“1. Modelling phenomenological experience in the making of humanities (data as capta, primary modeling, the representation of temporal and spatial experience); 2. Modeling relations among humanities documents i.e. discourse fields (a different metric is needed to understand dates on diplomatic documents in the spring of 1944 than one needed to constitute understanding of those dated to the same period of the spring of 1950 etc.); 3. Modeling the representations of temporality and spatiality that are in humanities documents (narrative is the most obvious); 4. Modeling the interpretation of any of the above (depicting or graphing the performative quality of interpretation).” (Drucker, p. 15)
Needless to say, that Drucker includes text-based artifacts within her critique as they also adhere to the principles of design and graphical representation.