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In Search of Meaning: Thinking Information Visualization within Art History Research

Boek - Dissertatie

This dissertation presents our work at the intersection of Art History (AH) and Information Visualization (InfoVis). In this text, we describe our efforts towards understanding the relationship between AH and InfoVis scholarship, along with conceptual and practical contributions to the growing interest in Digital Art History. More concretely, this dissertation aims to answer the following research questions: RQ1: How can we design InfoVis tools that specifically support art historical research material and practice? RQ2: What is the relationship between InfoVis and humanistic research? How can it guide the design process for building usable visualization tools to support humanistic research? To answer these questions, we followed a reflective design approach that brings together critical reading of the literature, empirical research, and technical contributions. This approach allowed us to build upon the expertise of infovis and humanist participants in our user research, and to complement the conceptual approach with quantitative and qualitative empirical findings. All of this led to the development of new conceptualisations as well as the reflection on methodology, tools, and findings. As a result, we contribute a discussion about the place of InfoVis in art history research (and the humanities at large). Through our Layers of Meaning framework, we highlight the importance of semantics in visualization interfaces, and demonstrate their link to usability, trust, and adoption. We introduce a novel graph-drawing algorithm that implements an added layer of semantics, and find that this layout leads to lower cognitive load, improved perception, and higher personal preference ranking. Next, we demonstrate how this algorithm can be used by designing and developing a novel network visualization interface specifically designed to support historical social network research. The NAHR visualization does so by supporting multi-dimensional social types throughout time, thereby enabling a high-level view on community dynamics. Finally, we propose a re-evaluation of the role of digital tools in humanistic research by introducing the notion of digital satellites. This conceptualisation aims to encourage designers and scholars to think about the entire spectrum of functions that digital research tools hold in humanistic research contexts, and proposes ways to improve their longevity and effectivenes
Jaar van publicatie:2022
Toegankelijkheid:Open