7th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities
16 October 2022 - IEEE VIS 2022
This year, you can contribute to VIS4DH 2022 in the following ways - you can submit to the Paper track, the Provocations track, or Lab talks. Our call for submissions is open to all fields of the (digital) humanities, social sciences and to all areas of visualization research and practice. The workshop is intended to put different ways of seeing, knowing, articulating, and transforming arguments into dialogue in order to foster and to intensify collaborations between humanities and visualization researchers. We are particularly interested in papers and provocations that bring different disciplines together.
Paper Track
Multimodality
Human expression has myriad forms. Painting, reading & writing, music, crafts, dance, fashion, cooking, and other artistic or cultural efforts are more than just visual experiences—they incorporate hearing, touch, and even taste. This multimodality raises both reflective and creative questions about the role of visualization. What do we lose when we reduce these rich multisensory experiences, artifacts, or collections down to just the visual and textual content? How can we compensate for or offset these losses? How can we augment visualizations with other experiential modes, and can these augmentations improve the (embodied) experience accessibility, viscerality, or impact of our data? In other words, what does it mean to think beyond the visual when it comes to visualization in the humanities?
Multimodality is an emerging and promising area of research in the digital humanities. There is a consideration of multimodality in terms of input: the forms of expression (such as music, sculpture, craft and performative practices) that have traditionally not been well-supported by existing visualization techniques or tools, as well as in terms of output: how we might leverage new modes of expression in our representations of data, using techniques such as sonification, data physicalization, AR/VR, and even olfaction or taste?
To initiate a discussion about the challenges and opportunities of multimodality in VIS4DH research, we invite work around (but not limited to) the following questions:
- What does modality mean across humanistic research disciplines? How has humanist tradition dealt with multimodality in research material? How does it align with the meaning of modality in visualization research?
- What do we lose when translating the rich embodied and sensory experiences of cultural objects into data, and then into visualizations? What are strategies to mitigate or compensate for the sensory/experiential losses?
- What is the potential of data representations beyond the visual in the context of DH? What are the possibilities of visualizing intangible and under-represented humanistic material in visualization scholarship?
- How do cultural artifacts and embodied practices inform different modes of representation beyond the visual?
- How can multimodality support accessibility in visualization tools?
We invite papers at the intersection of visualization and (digital) humanities that provide both theoretical and applied perspectives around these and other questions.
For our paper track we are seeking works from scholars in visualization, the humanities, social science, and the arts 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.
Submission format
Submissions will take the form of short papers. Papers should not exceed 5 pages excluding references. Submissions are meant to describe and critically discuss works at the intersection of visualization and humanities research, including applied case studies, empirical results and/or theoretical perspectives. We welcome works that highlight the difficulties (and proposed solutions) of designing visualizations in the context of humanities research and/or applying concepts from humanities research to foster visualization research and design.
Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their paper at the workshop . All presentations will be followed by a lively discussion with workshop participants. The archiving and publication options for VIS4DH 2022 are still under development and will be detailed soon.
Note that VIS 2022 will be held in hybrid format, with opportunities to attend virtually or in-person in Oklahoma City.
Submitting a paper
Paper submissions should be in PDF format following the two-column IEEE TVCG Conference Style Template (see http://junctionpublishing.org/vgtc/Tasks/camera.html for templates in Word, or LaTeX).
We encourage authors to submit additional audio or video demonstrations as supplementary material to their paper. Videos should not be longer than 3 minutes. For videos, we recommend QuickTime, MPEG-4 up to 100 MB with a reasonable resolution. In line with the theme of multimodality, this optional supplementary audio or video file should highlight the other-than-visual aspects of the work, with a brief voice over that reflects, or expands the arguments made in the paper.
Papers should be submitted via PCS (https://new.precisionconference.com/vgtc). Submission deadline is July 8 July 15, 2022 (5pm PST). Notifications will be sent on August 8, 2022. The camera ready deadline to submit the final version of papers is August 22, 2022.
Submissions to the Paper Tracks 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.
Provocation Track
Multimodality
Submissions to the VIS4DH Provocations track will take the form of a paragraph articulating a strongly-held viewpoint that addresses a particular perspective on this year’s workshop topic, Multimodality. We especially seek submissions that likely will promote back-and-forth debate within the interdisciplinary VIS4DH community.
This year’s submissions to the Provocations track should reflect on one or several of the following questions:
- To what degree can we gain new perspectives through multimodal representation of one-dimensional material? Is it even possible? What is gained or loss?
- Is there a risk of multimodal approaches alienating audiences by leaning too heavily on tech-heavy solutions? What are the opportunity costs for multimodality? E.g. complexity, time, portability/transferability
- How to reconcile input and output multimodality? What strategies can be put in place to bridge this ‘many-to-many’ relationship? Is visualization just a flattening of the multimodal landscape spanned by cultural collections?
- Where does multimodality start? What do we learn by viewing the interplay of scholarly modalities - such as text, pictures, and sound - through the lens of multimodality?
Submission format
Submissions to the Provocations track should take the following format:
- Title: Provide a title that roughly describes the topic of your provocation/viewpoint.
- Summary of provocation (1 sentence): One-sentence summary that describes the essence of your viewpoint/argument.
- Provocation statement & argument (200 words): Provides a brief description of your provocation and its argument.
- Counter-Perspective(s) (optional, 100 words): Provides potential counter-arguments to your provocation.
- Works Cited (optional): Provide citations for the work that the provocation is in conversation with.
Submissions will be assessed based on their likelihood of provoking fruitful discussion. Provocations presented and discussed at VIS4DH 2021 can be found here.
Accepted authors will be invited to present their viewpoint and argument in the form of a panel discussion at the workshop. Accepted provocations will also be published on the workshop website.
Submitting a provocation
Submissions to the Provocations Track should be submitted via this Google Form (https://forms.gle/CzVXQjMRbRv12fF67) by August 29, 2022 (5pm PST). Notification will be sent on September 11, 2022.
Lab Talks
Since 2020, the VIS4DH workshop has included Lab Talks, a format where research groups working at the intersection of visualization and the digital humanities present their work or labs more generally in brief lightning talks.
We ask you to provide a few details in your submission:
- Title of your talk
- Presenter name and contact information
- Short summary (2-3 sentences) of what you’d like to speak about in your lighting talk
To present a lab talk or have your lab listed on this website (or for changes to existing entries), please get in touch by using this Google Form (https://forms.gle/Ak6FC5WGB86DNhjs6). The deadline for lab talk submissions this year is August 29, 2022 (5pm PST). The acceptance notifications will be sent out by September 11, 2022.
Because of time considerations, we will have to limit the number of presentations. We will make selections that ensure geographic and disciplinary diversity. For questions, please do not hesitate to email us at: vis4dh@gmail.com.