{"id":8032,"date":"2017-05-23T07:17:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T05:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/visualisation-and-visual-thinking-in-the-arts-and-humanities-new-perspectives-in-digital-humanities-conference\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:31:27","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T09:31:27","slug":"visualisation-and-visual-thinking-in-the-arts-and-humanities-new-perspectives-in-digital-humanities-conference","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/visualisation-and-visual-thinking-in-the-arts-and-humanities-new-perspectives-in-digital-humanities-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Visualisation and visual thinking in the Arts and Humanities \u2013 New Perspectives in Digital Humanities Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the 2017 edition of the conference, arts and humanities students and early career researchers, regardless of their technical background, were invited to share their ideas and experiences in their creative and scientific encounters with visualisation as it is deployed in and for research across disciplines.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Friday 19 May 2017, we (Sytze, Eva and Jakub) attended our first conference in the context of the C\u00b2DH. We arranged the trip to King\u2019s College London<\/a> a few weeks in advance and after overcoming Murphy\u2019s law we managed to arrive at our apartment the night before the ‘New Perspectives in Digital Humanities Conference<\/a>‘. In the morning, we arrived quite early and enjoyed a small breakfast before the crowd started to arrive. At 9 a.m. professor Allan Blackwell<\/a>, specialised in interdisciplinary design introduced the history and fields involved in visual representation<\/a>. Outlining the history of technology through a combination of inventions, philosophical theorists and certain institutions such as the mathematical laboratory of Cambridge, structuring his presentation as a web of interconnected fields of interest. At the start of his presentation he discussed the work at the mathematical laboratory of Cambridge in the 1940s, showing women working on the machine with the men standing in front of the machine \u2018taking credit for women\u2019s work\u2019. In addition, he showed the usage of syllogism in terms of manipulation of language (text) processing devices. Furthermore, the audience got acquainted with famous historical figures in physics and computer science (e.g. Leonhard Euler, George Boole, Claude Shannon, Douglas Engelbart\u2026). Their inventions were shortly outlined to explain the current scientific visualisations. The key message, or question to be more precise, is to consider who gets to be creative in the development of new technology: designer or use?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a brief introduction on the work being performed in Digital Humanities at the university of King\u2019s College by professor Evelyn Welch stressing the key role of Digital Humanities in understanding the data, there were two parallel sessions of short paper presentations. Sytze attended the Tools Presentation where the third year PhD student Sam Cottrell<\/a> presented his work on visualising archive metadata focussing on the registration of inventions at the National Archive. His example combining a map visualisation with a stacked bar chart to display evolution over time offered great inspiration on what is possible using the google geocoder API<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, he discussed uncertainty at every stage of the visualisation pipeline from the acquisition of data over filtering and mapping, to rendering. Uncertainty can be linked to both space and time, for example in mapping places that don\u2019t exist anymore. One way to display this uncertainty is by colour coding uncertainty based on the confidence score of google geocoder and manually checking places with a low fidelity score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eva and Jakub attended the other session where two more speakers outlined their work. One lecture in particular proved very interesting, although not that practical for analysing our own sources. Richard A. Carter<\/a> talked about how you can not only analyse<\/em> data, but also can create<\/em> with data, as the photograph below shows. In his research he encodes poems, showing us how machines see language via a graphical representation consisting of geometrical shapes and patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In between presentations we practiced our \u2018networking\u2019 skills as encouraged by dr. Ariana Ferreira Loff at the first Brown Bag Lunch for PhD students at the University of Luxembourg. We met up with some students from the master program and had very interesting conversations at lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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