Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research.

Due to their historical nature, humanistic data encompass multiple sources of uncertainty. While humanists are accustomed to handling such uncertainty with their established methods, they are cautious of visualizations that appear overly objective and fail to communicate this uncertainty. To design more trustworthy visualizations for humanistic research, therefore, a deeper understanding of its relation to uncertainty is needed. We systematically reviewed 126 publications from digital humanities literature that use visualization as part of their research process, and examined how uncertainty was handled and represented in their visualizations. Crossing these dimensions with the visualization type and use, we identified that uncertainty originated from multiple steps in the research process from the source artifacts to their datafication. We also noted how besides known uncertainty coping strategies, such as excluding data and evaluating its effects, humanists also embraced uncertainty as a separate dimension important to retain. By mapping how the visualizations encoded uncertainty, we identified four approaches that varied in terms of explicitness and customization. This work contributes with two empirical taxonomies of uncertainty and it's corresponding coping strategies, as well as with the foundation of a research agenda for uncertainty visualization in the digital humanities. Our findings further the synergy among humanists and visualization researchers, and ultimately contribute to the development of more trustworthy, uncertainty-aware visualizations.

Introducing Layers of Meaning (LoM): A Framework to Reduce Semantic Distance of Visualization In Humanistic Research.

Information visualization (infovis) is a powerful tool for exploring rich datasets. Within humanistic research, rich qualitative data and domain culture make traditional infovis approaches appear reductive and disconnected, leading to low adoption. In this paper, we use a multi-step approach to scrutinize the relationship between infovis and the humanities and suggest new directions for it. We first look into infovis from the humanistic perspective by exploring the humanistic literature around infovis. We validate and expand those findings though a co-design workshop with humanist and infovis experts. Then, we translate our findings into guidelines for designers and conduct a design critique exercise to explore their effect on the perception of humanist researchers. Based on these steps, we introduce Layers of Meaning, a framework to reduce the semantic distance between humanist researchers and visualizations of their research material, by grounding infovis tools in time and space, physicality, terminology, nuance, and provenance.