DH-Keynote

Beyond demoware - how do and how could humanists exploit visualization in their core work?

Abstract: The presentation begins by asking to what extent visualization in the Digital Humanities has actually changed the practices of mainstream humanists. The presentation will then consider the possibilities for visualization in the classic practice of philology, by which I designate the sum of all ways in which we can exploit the linguistic record to understand the past in its entirety. Here I focus particularly upon several cognitive barriers:(1) the challenge of analyzing text at scale without losing the precision of traditional close reading; (2) the problems of working with large scale trans-cultural subjects that involve sources in more languages than we can study, much less master; (3) the challenges of assessing reliable contributions from citizen scientists with many backgrounds and from around the world; (4) the role that each of these questions plays in the larger challenge of balancing localism and globalism as we think about the past in a global age; (5) the implications of these questions for the particular task of developing a new version of the Perseus Digital Library that can serve a Global Philology.

VIS-Capstone

Discovering Treasure Troves in Digital Humanities

Abstract: In digital humanities (DH), scholars conducted their data-informed research in ways similar to the analytical processes in the sciences. Large and complex datasets are collected, processed, summarized, and observed; hypotheses are formulated, explored, and scrutinized; analytical evidences are computed or uncovered; and findings are presented and communicated. Visualization can be an enabling tool in every stage of such a workflow, especially in many situations where fully automated approaches cannot adequately handle the high dimensionality of the data, address the sparsity of sampling, or capture the knowledge of the scholars. Therefore, DH problems are treasure troves, offering a broad spectrum of challenges and opportunities to the application as well as the advancement of the visualization technology. In this talk, the speaker will share his team's experience in collaborating with DH scholars, conducting DH projects, and making new technical advancements while fulfilling the requirements of DH research. In the spirit of this workshop, the speaker will also use nine DH problems (in an ambitious but unsuccessful grant proposal) as part of the discourse on new research directions.

Topics

The focus of this workshop is on applied visualization in the digital humanities, as well as highlighting domains in the digital humanities with unmet visualization challenges. These applications and domains include, but are not limited to:

• Literature
• Philology and Linguistics
• Art and Art Criticism
• Political Science
• Performance (Music, Dance, Film, and Theatre)
• Cultural and Historical Studies

We are especially interested in a number of open questions in this space, including:

• The impact of visual analytics systems on research in the digital humanities:
  • How can interactive visualizations support new questions, and new scales of research, in the DH community?
  • How can we encourage DH scholars to seek out visualizations, or collaboration with visualization researchers?
• Characteristics of visualization for the digital humanities:
  • How does visualization with a DH focus differ from general research in the visualization community?
  • How do their user groups differ? How can debates in public humanities scholarship inform DH visualization practices?
  • How can we remove obstacles for humanities scholars wanting to use visual analytics approaches for their research?
• How digital humanities research questions and tasks can push the frontier of visualization research:
  • What challenges are there for developing systems with novelty in both visualization and DH communities?
  • How do we evaluate visualizations where we lack ground truth data?
  • How can we build bridges between salient issues in the humanities (uncertainty, interpretative complexity, critical theoretical approaches) and the conceptual languages of visualization?

Submissions

This workshop is seeking work from scholars in both visualization and the humanities who use visualization as part of the process of analyzing and interrogating human culture. Submissions will present original research ideas or results as they relate to visualization for the digital humanities. Each submission should clearly state its specific contribution to this growing field of research.

Submissions will take the form of short (2-4 page - excluding references) papers, falling into one of three submission types:

• Extended Abstracts: These submissions are meant to highlight emerging visualization research in the digital humanities. The intention of these shorter submissions is to provide a platform for feedback for work that is still in progress, rather than present completed projects.
• Short Papers: These submissions are meant to summarize more mature work in visualization for the digital humanities, including case studies, system descriptions, and empirical results. Of special consideration are works that highlight the difficulties (and propose solutions) of designing visualizations for the digital humanities. Applied work from the digital humanities that is highly visual in nature would also be considered for acceptance.
• Position Papers: These submissions are meant to present viewpoints and opinions on the interplay between visualization and the digital humanities. These positions should be informed by a deep involvement and experience in one (or ideally, both) fields. Position papers should be thought-provoking but also well-supported.

Authors of accepted short and position papers will be invited for a 9-minute research presentation (including 2 minutes for audience questions). Additionally, they will participate in a moderated panel discussion. Authors of accepted extended abstracts will give 5 minute “fast-forward” presentations.

Submissions should be in two-column IEEE TVCG format. Latex and Word templates are available at: http://junctionpublishing.org/vgtc/Tasks/camera_tvcg.html Submissions will be optionally double blind. Authors wishing to submit their work double-blind should remove author information from the cover page of their submitted document, and take care to avoid identifying information in the submission itself (e.g., references “our” work). Submissions should be submitted via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vis4dh2016 by 5 PM PST, 30 July 2016. Submissions should be in pdf format, clearly indicating the paper type: extended abstract, short paper, or position paper. Submissions should not exceed four pages.