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      Quantifying Culture: The Value of Visualization inside (and outside) Libraries, Museums, and the Academy

      proceedings-article
      Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2012) (EVA)
      Electronic Visualisation and the Arts
      10 - 12 July 2012
      Quantitative data, Information visualization, Cultural heritage, Digital humanities, Linked data, Macroscope, Representation, Ethics
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            Abstract

            Maps, diagrams, illustrations, and other visual materials have long been part of cultural institutions, as well as the academic disciplines of the arts, sciences, and humanities. In the past several years, these visual materials have been increasingly centred on quantitative data, with sensors, geotags, social networks, and “big data” now occupying the forefronts of research and public engagement. With this use of quantitative data comes the need for more sophisticated and adequate visual representations, particularly through the field of information visualization (i.e., infovis). In this paper, I explore five ways in which infovis can enrich the visual culture of libraries, museums, and the academy: (1) digital, interactive visualizations can take advantage of linked data to provide participants with richer, contextualized experiences; (2) high-volume, longitudinal datasets can be seen from a macroscopic perspective, in which patterns, processes, and systems-level phenomena all become visible; (3) the cognitive science foundations of infovis help produce designs that extend working memory and amplify cognition, allowing many viewers to grasp large, complex data for the first time; (4) the empirical foundations of quantitative data collection help to reduce biases in representing events; and (5) this empirical validity helps to produce visualizations that are more ethical in the sense that they are more inclusive of various groups and disinterested on the whole—the victors can still write history, but only insofar as they can measure it (and cannot avoid all measurements of it).

            Content

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Conference
            July 2012
            July 2012
            : 253-257
            Affiliations
            [0001]Pratt Institute, School of Information & Library Science

            144 W 14 th Street, 6 th Floor

            New York, NY 10016
            Article
            10.14236/ewic/EVA2012.42
            f443ce56-92c1-4945-a280-36b4da292537
            © Chris Alen Sula. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2012), London, UK

            This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

            Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2012)
            EVA
            London, UK
            10 - 12 July 2012
            Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)
            Electronic Visualisation and the Arts
            History
            Product

            1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

            Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2012.42
            Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/
            Categories
            Electronic Workshops in Computing

            Applied computer science,Computer science,Security & Cryptology,Graphics & Multimedia design,General computer science,Human-computer-interaction
            Cultural heritage,Quantitative data,Information visualization,Digital humanities,Linked data,Macroscope,Representation,Ethics

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