Historians and other humanities scholars are increasingly seeking to develop and use visualization tools, methods, and theories for making sense of patterns in large sets of heterogeneous historical data with multiple dimensions. For example, the Electronic Enlightenment database of over 55,000 letters and documents exchanged between 6,400 correspondents in the Republic of Letters presents a typical challenge confronting the emerging field of digital humanities. How can humanities scholars trained in close reading of individual documents make sense of patterns in large sets of data?
The new challenges posed by an exponentially growing corpus of online historical data also present an opportunity for collaborations with computer scientists interested in data visualization, interpretation, and human-computer interaction. Computer scientists are deeply interested in how users interact with visualization tools to explore, explain, and engage with data to create meaning. We engaged in an iterative, collaborative effort that brought together historians, computer scientists, and an academic technology specialist to design data visualizations to represent the intellectual network of the Republic of Letters.
Developed by Yuankai Ge, Daniel Chang, Shiwei Song in collaboration with Mapping the Republic of Letters, Tooling Up for Digital Histories, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Electronic Enlightenment Project.