Visualization offers powerful methods to help us understand the world around us. It is used to reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories inside any dataset, whether it is the patterns in a great literary work, the timelines of a historical collection or the geographic distribution of important archaeological sites. Furthermore, the density of information now available to scholars in a networked and digital era is enormous. We are inundated with thousands of words on e-mails, tweets, digital documents and web pages every day. As the sheer volume overwhelms one’s ability to digest text-based information in the traditional way, we increasingly rely on visualization methods to help us summarize and analyze documents and textual data. Humanists, including artists and designers, are developing visualizations as essential ways in which to ‘see’ their data .
The theoretical aspect of this course offers students a general introduction to data visualization, visual complexity and information aesthetics. The applied aspect of this course focuses on the visualization of documents and textual data. Students will learn the fundamentals of visualization techniques on textual data, evaluate their benefits and drawbacks, and apply them in a hands-on term project.
