Historical Interactive Visualization

This talk will take an informal look at interactive visualization projects done at the University of Virginia’s Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) and the Sciences, Arts, & Humanities Network of Technology Initiatives (SHANTI) digital humanities centers. The projects were built using an NEH-funded visualization authoring tool, VisualEyes, developed at UVa.VisualEyes enables scholars to present selected primary source materials and research findings while encouraging active inquiry and hands-on learning among general and targeted audiences. It communicates through the use of dynamic displays that organize and present meaningful information in both traditional and multimedia formats, such as audio-video, animation, charts, maps, data, and interactive timelines. I will also show a number of student-generated visualizations, created in the context of undergraduate project-based learning (PBL) seminars, and discuss how visualization and PBL are strong partners to promote historical inquiry. As a consequence, I have developed a new model to help scaffold the design of data-driven interactive projects called ASSERT. Ask a question; Search for evidence to answer that question; Structure the data; Envision ways to answer the question using the structured data; Represent that data in a compelling interactive manner; and finally, Tell a story using that data to answer the question.