Read Me First
Some things to think about if you want to make a map or visualisation:
1. Why do you want to make a visualisation?
Do you intend to make a specific argument with it? Do you intend to make a heuristic tool to explore a large collection of materials?
2. Is the data in your sources suitable for visualisation?
To begin with, is it in a digital format and thus not require digitisation before hand? In the case of map data is it geocoded? And just as importantly what is geocoded and is this consistent across the data? In the case of network visualisations are the relations between your object machine readable?
3. Are you considering variation across time, space, or both?
Are you focused on a particular state of affairs or the flow of a process? This will have repercussions on the design of the visualisation, including whether it is to be captured in a static or series of static visualisations or something dynamic, however that might be defined.
4. Are you prone to the sin of over classifying your data?
Can the design of your visualisation contribute to the naturalisation of problematic historical categories. The solution is not the proliferation of categories because this ironically increases the likelihood of including ones that are problematic.
To mitigate this problem: try to first identify more stable, and less problematic identifiers and first focus on them. At the very least add descriptive justifications for the structuring of the data in your visualisation and its limitations. It may also be productive to create a variety of visualisation based on the same data but which highlights some of the potentially different different perspectives.
4. If your visualisation will involve employing computative methods that will qualitatively transform the output and you do not understand the algorithms and the consequences of this transformation,
5. Keep in throughout the process that it is the researcher and not the visualisation which produces the analysis. Comment: There is some variation in the way this was to be expressed: knowledge vs. analysis, how much or how little to we concede these tools and visualisations can accomplish.
6. In the case of maps, be conscious of the way in which your projection, your perspective, your bounding limits, and other design choices dictate or at least delimit the way in which it can be read.
For example, be aware of how you map may reproduce certain relationships between center and periphery, etc.
7. Seek inspiration from other visualisations of different kinds that attempt to tackle similar problems or sources.
8. Be conscious of the time that may be required to gain the minimum competency in the tool you have chosen to create the map or visualisation. This is often underestimated.
You don’t have to have do everything yourself. The best visualisations are the product of close collaborations.
– Hans, Georgina, Alex, Gero, and Konrad
Reading some of these questions and comments I am wondering: Do we attribute a different epistemological value to images, maps and visualisations compared to word and narrative? Do we imagine maps and images being “purer” than text? If so, why? We try to build arguments, we teach our students to craft arguments in essays (with words)? Are maps and images not suitable to make a historian’s noble argument?
In our discussion, we talked the possibility of forming unconscious assumptions that by nature of using software or datasets, we are making historical analysis more ‘scientific’, or that readers/viewers will assume it is more scientific/accurate – an objective that most historians would hope that the discipline had moved away from.
This is perhaps an area where the ‘newness’ of the practice of visualisation seems very apparent. Can we develop capacities to critically create and analyse maps and images, alongside learning the skills to make them? Would/does the increased energy and resource being devoted to Digital Humanities involve this type of awareness? The authority of maps is a central theme in histories of cartography – do we need to be applying these critiques to our own practices today?