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Hello, THATCampers! In the spirit of one session/one tool THATCamp production, this document is the outcome of a discussion about how to prep data and choose a visualization tool for humanists who don’t have direct access to high-level database and programming skills.

We welcome your comments, suggestions and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll find this step-by-step planning document useful as a hand-out to communicate with colleagues and/or students who are just getting started in the research process for projects that include data visualization. Additionally, there is a list of visualization tools collected in the Google Doc that this session’s attendees produced.

Thanks to all of the session attendees for lively discussion and great contributions!

Steps to take for managing data to make visualization easier:

1. Start with the argument you’re making and how that argument could look on paper
   1. Start thinking about the visualization before you start taking notes
   2. Find visualization tools to match your paper mockup
   3. Determine feasibility of collecting data for that visualization tool/type of visualization
      1. This will depend on your skill level and comfort with technology.
   4. Understand the limitations of the visualization tool (e.g. single date required when data is often in date ranges)
2. Consider end result
   1. Data exploration? Out of the box software is best used for exploring data
   2. Data presentation in argument form? Building an argument in graphic form will probably require (but check with @tjowens about facets in Recollection)
   3. There will be a $0, $1,000, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 and $1,000,000 version of this. First make the one that costs nothing and think about how you would scale up if it turned out to be particularly interesting.
      1. If you compromise and go a low-cost version, don’t forget the idealized version you wanted in the first place.
3. Find the least complex tool you need for the job of data collection
   1. Excel is a useful tool, but data with a lot of repetition is ideally expressed in a relational database.
      1. Excel can auto-complete entries, but auto-complete can also create inaccurate data
4. Start with small data sets, and iterate often
   1. Simplify data w/ data dictionary
   2. Use visualization as data remediation

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Building off something that crossed my mind some time ago, it seems to me that “the history of humanities computing” is ripe for an online presentation–one that (naturally) uses all the best practices for the gathering and presentation of history in the digital environment.  It’s got everything we need: a finite start date in the not too distant past, but a long and varied enough history to be interesting, many players who are still available (which is to say: oral history), electronically–  and traditionally-published professional literature to mine, professional organizations, illustrative project examples.

Several folks have undertaken projects related to this, but so far it doesn’t seem that there’s a one-stop shop to provide a real context for people seeking to better understand the history of the field and a sense of the specific projects that have emerged from and contributed to it.

Ideally, this session would attract the éminences grises of the digital humanities who can provide their own experiences with and read on the history of the field, the young’uns who have questions about what’s come before, folks interested in clever ways to present historical information (text, video, oral history, etc.) online, historians of the (digital) humanities, information managers who can help organize all this mountain of pertinent information, and anybody else who feels they have a dog in this hunt.  Help us:

• Figure out who to talk to about the history of the digital humanities (both players and scholars)
• Figure out what to talk to them about
• Think about best practices for archiving and presenting oral (and other) history online
• Find examples of good work to inspire us
• Develop visualizations: timelines, thematic treatments, “family trees” of projects and scholars

I fully admit to being a context hound–I love to see how planets relate to one another within a solar system and solar systems within galaxies.  In many ways I lack a context for my own specific work in the field and an understanding of how it fits in with others’.  And part of this, too, is a response to the broader notion that newer practitioners of the digital humanities–which in many ways is all of us–are unaware of their (our?) place in the history of humanities computing.  They/we too often lack a sense of the bigger picture.  So maybe we can create a living, breathing, go-to resource to help answer that very need.

What else might such a project enable, or do, or present?

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We put stuff on maps. We can put stuff on historic maps. We can put things on timelines. What do we want to do next? There are a ton of cool visualization things going on, many of which use simple javascript libraries. Which of these are useful for cultural heritage collections? Further, what kinds of ways of visualizing are useful for what kinds of objects and collections?

In part, I think this is about a bit of a translation between the very active world of data visualization into a context where we think about various digital incarnations of cultural heritage objects. So, visualizations as interfaces for discovery of individual things as well as visualization in the more general sense of seeing the big picture. I would be interested in setting up a bit of mind meld to think through some of this. Specifically, what kinds of data do we have and what are some new ways we can create web based interfaces and visualizations to interact with and understand that data?

Here is a suggestion for how we could go about this:

1. (20 min) of swap and shareVery quickly look at a bunch of examples in these three categories: (For starters we can start listing things we want to talk about in the comments on this post)

• a) sites with cool visual interfaces to cultural heritage collections./li>
• b) examples of sets of items, individual objects, and other stuff that we want to interface with./li>
• c) fun visualization widgets and interfaces that have nothing to do with the humanities but that we might mine for ideas or ideally just use.

2. (30 min) Small groups sketch out one page wireframesI would then like to break into small groups and match make some of the As Bs and Cs. Take some of these cool ideas, pick a specific kind of collections and have each of the smaller groups create a one page small paper prototype or simple wireframe of what this cool interface would look like with a particular kind of digital collection or digital object.

3. (10 min) Rapid report outWe would then take 2 minutes each to report out the pitches for these interfaces. (Could video these on someone’s phone and post to youtube?) We then post pics and one paragraph descriptions of what this interface could do for a specific kind of collection or kind of object.

I have included some initial examples of stuff we might talk a bout in part one. If your interested in this please add more ideas in the comments.

A) Example interfaces:

• Mappy timey stuff like historypin: www.historypin.com/
• Historical data on maps: acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/harlem/
• Change over time in editions of a text: benfry.com/traces/
• Railroad owner thing: nexthistory.org/shaping-the-west.html
• BYU Corpus Stuff: corpus.byu.edu/

B) Fun Data set/item examples

• menus menus.nypl.org/
• pictures loc.gov/pictures
• quilts www.quiltindex.org/msumuseumcollection.php
• sheet music data.gov.au/dataset/south-australian-sheet-music-state-library-of-south-australia/
• convict transportation records data.gov.au/dataset/british-convict-transportation-registers/

C) Open Visualization Libs

• Timeplot: www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/
• InfoViz thejit.org/demos/
• TufteGraph xaviershay.github.com/tufte-graph/
• milkchart code.google.com/p/milkchart/
• VIDI www.dataviz.org/

So what do you think? What things should we add to the list? Who want’s to be in on this?