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Introduction: Data Visualisation and the Humanities

What is humanistic about data visualisation? As a body of methods for exploring and explicating quantitative datasets, data visualisation has grown in importance in the humanities with the rise of the digital age and, with it, the age of “big data”; yet visualisation still has the air of an alien element. Its growing prominence challenges us to rethink the relationship between traditional literary analysis and the new forms of analysis and evidence that computing technologies make available. It also challenges us to consider how we might square traditional criteria for rigorous analysis in the humanities with digital methods of analysis. How do literary keywords such as style, influence and genre demand rethinking in the context of quantitative analysis? Do we necessarily abandon a theoretical commitment to foregrounding the material basis of texts when we use digital methods of “distant reading” to understand textual transmission? What is the relationship in literary studies—which continues to give a special place, in catalogues, syllabi, anthologies and indeed literary databases, to the individual author and the mythos of genius—between data and the data point? In English Studies, a field defined by its attention to verbal phenomena, how can visual tools and practices rework, rather than simply refigure, verbal information? How can the distinctive textures of experience that humanistic documents—such as poems, plays or letters—record complicate the codes, frameworks and methods of visualisation techniques that arose in the context of business and the sciences? Will the imbrication of digital methods into established humanities disciplines affect their social paradigms? When we use visual graphics to translate numerical data, what do we lose by privileging visual over other means of encoding information? For researchers who seek to incorporate digital methods into their work, for teachers who seek to bring digital methods into the curriculum and for administrators who seek guidelines for evaluating digital humanities projects, such questions get to the heart of an urgent problem in the digital humanities: reconciling the young age of data analysis with the rich texture of research that humanities scholarship emphasises. An important feature that separates the humanities from the sciences is that while the scientist’s methods can be paraphrased without any loss, in the humanities the description itself is understood to be part of the method. (The anthropologist Clifford Geertz captured an aspect of this praxis in the phrase “thick description”, referring to the careful negotiation of the researcher’s frameworks of observation.) For humanists, part of the challenge of honouring this praxis while using digital methods is a problem of design. As we build digital systems to manage new volumes