This paper presents discursive patinas, a technique to visualize discussions onto data visualizations, inspired by how people leave traces in the physical world. While data visualizations are widely discussed in online communities and social media, comments tend to be displayed separately from the visualization and we lack ways to relate these discussions back to the content of the visualization, e.g., to situate comments, explain visual patterns, or question assumptions. In our visualization annotation interface, users can designate areas within the visualization. Discursive patinas are made of overlaid visual marks (anchors), attached to textual comments with category labels, likes, and replies. By coloring and styling the anchors, a meta visualization emerges, showing what and where people comment and annotate the visualization. These patinas show regions of heavy discussions, recent commenting activity, and the distribution of questions, suggestions, or personal stories. We ran workshops with 90 students, domain experts, and visualization researchers to study how people use anchors to discuss visualizations and how patinas influence people’s understanding of the discussion. Our results show that discursive patinas improve the ability to navigate discussions and guide people to comments that help understand, contextualize, or scrutinize the visualization. We discuss the potential of anchors and patinas to support discursive engagements, including critical readings of visualizations, design feedback, and feminist approaches to data visualization.

We present a multi-dimensional, multi-level, and multi-channel approach to data visualization for the purpose of constructive climate journalism. Data visualization has assumed a central role in environmental journalism and is often used in data stories to convey the dramatic consequences of climate change and other ecological crises. However, the emphasis on the catastrophic impacts of climate change tends to induce feelings of fear, anxiety, and apathy in readers. Climate mitigation, adaptation, and protection—all highly urgent in the face of the climate crisis—are at risk of being overlooked. These topics are more difficult to communicate as they are hard to convey on varying levels of locality, involve multiple interconnected sectors, and need to be mediated across various channels from the printed newspaper to social media platforms. So far, there has been little research on data visualization to enhance affective engagement with data about climate protection as part of solution-oriented reporting of climate change. With this research we characterize the unique challenges of constructive climate journalism for data visualization and share findings from a research and design study in collaboration with a national newspaper in Germany. Using the affordances and aesthetics of travel postcards, we present Klimakarten, a data journalism project on the progress of climate protection at multiple spatial scales (from national to local), across five key sectors (agriculture, buildings, energy, mobility, and waste), and for print and online use. The findings from quantitative and qualitative analysis of reader feedback confirm our overall approach and suggest implications for future work.

More than 250 years ago, Giovanni Battista Nolli, an Italian architect, engineer and cartographer, was concerned with how and where space is or is not publicly accessible. In his map ‘La nuova topografia di Roma Comasco’, he mapped publicly accessible interior and exterior spaces of Rome with an impressively high level of detail as a figure-ground map. Since Nolli’s time, both the character and diversity of public spaces as well as cartographic technology have changed. This research project aims to adapt some ideas behind Nolli’s map for today’s circumstances on the basis of open data, and seeks to develop methods for processing volunteered geographical information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) to identify, categorize, and map public spaces based on thematic and geometric information.

This contribution explores the instructive tensions between art-historical research and semantic data modeling. While the potential of LOD-applications is obvious in terms of standardization and precision some aspects of research may not be formally represented. Therefore we propose to bridge LOD and full text descriptions through information visualization.

Existing work on visualizing multivariate graphs is primarily concerned with representing the attributes of nodes. Even though edges are the constitutive elements of networks, there have been only few attempts to visualize attributes of edges. In this work, we focus on the critical importance of edge attributes for interpreting network visualizations and building trust in the underlying data. We propose ‘unfolding of edges’ as an interactive approach to integrate multivariate edge attributes dynamically into existing node-link diagrams. Unfolding edges is an in-situ approach that gradually transforms basic links into detailed representations of the associated edge attributes. This approach extends focus+context, semantic zoom, and animated transitions for network visualizations to accommodate edge details on-demand without cluttering the overall graph layout. We explore the design space for the unfolding of edges, which covers aspects of making space for the unfolding, of actually representing the edge context, and of navigating between edges. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we present two case studies in the context of historical network analysis and computational social science. For these, web-based prototypes were implemented based on which we conducted interviews with domain experts. The experts’ feedback suggests that the proposed unfolding of edges is a useful tool for exploring rich edge information of multivariate graphs.

Journalism has become more data-driven and inherently visual in recent years. Photographs, illustrations, infographics, data visualizations, and general images help convey complex topics to a wide audience. The way that visual artifacts influence how readers form an opinion beyond the text is an important issue to research, but there are few works about this topic. In this context, we research the persuasive, emotional and memorable dimensions of data visualizations and illustrations in journalistic storytelling for long-form articles. We conducted a user study and compared the effects which data visualizations and illustrations have on changing attitude towards a presented topic. While visual representations are usually studied along one dimension, in this experimental study, we explore the effects on readers’ attitudes along three: persuasion, emotion, and information retention. By comparing different versions of the same article, we observe how attitudes differ based on the visual stimuli present, and how they are perceived when combined. Results indicate that the narrative using only data visualization elicits a stronger emotional impact than illustration-only visual support, as well as a significant change in the initial attitude about the topic. Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature on how visual artifacts may be used to inform and influence public opinion and debate. We present ideas for future work to generalize the results beyond the domain studied, the water crisis.

Drawing from the history of theatre and cinema, we present theoretical research on multi-modal data representations, such as sonifications, edibilizations, olfactations, and physicalizations. We contribute to digital humanities by translating montage of attraction to multimodal data representation and reflect on how the careful combination of modal variables can contribute to the coherence and emotional impact of multimodal interfaces.

Over the last decades, cultural heritage institutions have provided extensive machine-readable data, such as bibliographic and archival metadata, full-text collections, and authority records containing multitudes of implicit and explicit statements about the social relations between various types of entities. In this paper, we discuss how approaches to the creation and operation of advanced research infrastructure for historical network analysis (HNA) based on heterogeneous data sources from cultural heritage institutions can be examined and evaluated. Based on our interdisciplinary research, we describe challenges and strategies with a special focus on the issue of data processing, sketch out the advantages of human-centered project design in the form of a preliminary co-design workshop, and present an iterative approach to data visualization.

Die Historische Netzwerkanalyse (HNA) hat sich zu einem etablierten Forschungsfeld entwickelt. Zu ihren wichtigsten methodischen Herausforderungen gehört die Suggestionskraft von Visualisierungen. Die Transparenz bezüglich der Datenquellen ist daher für die HNA sowohl bei selbst erhobenen als auch bei sekundär genutzten Daten Voraussetzung, will sie geisteswissenschaftlichen Kriterien der Nachprüfbarkeit und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Interpretationen erfüllen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt und diskutiert – aufbauend auf einem iterativen und durch Workshops sowie einer Nutzer*innenstudie begleiteten Forschungsprozess – vier Designziele zur Verwirklichung einer solchen Transparenz: 1) Aufnahme und Kommunikation von Datenprovenienzen, 2) Dokumentation vorausgegangener Prozesse, 3) Offenhaltung der Interpretierbarkeit der Daten und 4) Unterstützung von Folgeforschung. Anschließend werden beispielhafte Umsetzungsstrategien in Form von Prototypen präsentiert.

Die in den letzten Jahren entstandenen explorativen Visualisierungen musealer Sammlungen widmen sich zumeist einzelnen Sammlungen, welche oft einer spezifischen Systematik folgen und eine geringe Vielfalt an Objektgattungen und Attributen aufweisen. Das hier vorgestellte Forschungsprojekt stellte sich die Frage, wie verschiedene, in sich heterogene, Sammlungen miteinander verknüpft, visualisiert und exploriert werden können, ohne die Unterschiede zwischen ihnen zu nivellieren. Dazu wurden im Rahmen einer Forschungskooperation mit den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin die Bestände aus dem 19. Jahrhundert der Alten Nationalgalerie sowie des Museums Europäischer Kulturen ausgewählt. Das Ziel war es, übergreifende Zusammenhänge und Resonanzen zwischen den Sammlungen aufzugreifen und dynamische, interaktive Arrangements zu entwickeln, welche die assoziative Exploration von Beständen anregen. Das Ergebnis ist ein interaktiver Prototyp, der eine globale Übersicht in Form einer annotierten Wolke mit der lokalen Perspektive eines auf Ähnlichkeiten basierten Pfads verknüpft.

This paper shares experiences with digital tools in the context of ethnological collections and discusses the challenges of accommodating different knowledge practices in collaboration with heritage communities. Departing from the Sharing Knowledge project (2014-2020), which took place in the Ethnologisches Museum (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz), the chapter argues that evaluating the weight of infrastructural inertia and exploring infrastructures’ operations – i.e., decoding the master narratives and exclusion mechanisms behind museum knowledge practices – are crucial steps to develop tools and tactics to circumvent and undermine this very inertia. While the first part of the paper pays critical attention to this case study, the second proposes new methodologies to devise infrastructures that embrace relationality and plurality. 

We present I/O Bits, a prototype personal informatics system that explores the potential for user-driven and situated self-tracking. With simple tactile inputs and small e-paper visualizations, I/O Bits are dedicated physical devices that allow individuals to track and visualize different kinds of personal activities in-situ. This is in contrast to most self-tracking systems, which automate data collection, centralize information displays, or integrate into multi-purpose devices like smartwatches or mobile phones. We report findings from an e-paper visualization workshop and a prototype deployment where participants constructed their own I/O Bits and used them to track a range of personal data. Based on these experiences, we contribute insights and opportunities for situated and user-driven personal informatics.

With this research (→ poster version) we present an approach to network visualization that expands the capabilities for visual encoding and interactive exploration through edges in node-link diagrams. Compared to the various possibilities for visual and interactive properties of nodes, there are few techniques for interactive visualization of multivariate edge attributes in node-link diagrams. Visualization of edge attributes is oftentimes limited by occlusion and space issues of methods that globally encode attributes in a node-link diagram for all edges, not sufficiently exploiting the potential of interaction. Building up on existing techniques for edge encoding and interaction, we propose ‘Unfolding Edges’ as an exemplary use of an on-demand detail enhancing approach for exploration of multivariate edge attributes.

Based on a collaborative visualization design process involving sensitive historical data and historiographical expertise, we investigate the relevance of ethical principles in visualization design. While fundamental ethical norms like truthfulness and accuracy are already well-described and common goals in visualization design, datasets that are accompanied by specific ethical concerns need to be processed and visualized with an additional level of carefulness and thought. There has been little research on adequate visualization design incorporating such considerations. To address this gap we present insights from Topography of Violence, a visualization project with the Jewish Museum Berlin that focuses on a dataset of more than 4,500 acts of violence against Jews in Germany between 1930 and 1938. Drawing from the joint project, we develop an approach to the visualization of sensitive data, which features both conceptual and procedural considerations for visualization design. Our findings provide value for both visualization researchers and practitioners by highlighting challenges and opportunities for ethical data visualization.

Effective use of data is an essential asset to modern cities. Visualization as a tool for analysis, exploration, and communication has become a driving force in the task of unravelling our complex urban fabrics. This paper outlines the findings from a series of three workshops from 2018-2020 bringing together experts in urban data visualization with the aim of exploring multidisciplinary perspectives from the human-centric lens. Based on the rich and detailed workshop discussions identifying challenges and opportunities for urban data visualization research, we outline major human-centric themes and considerations fundamental for CityVis design and introduce a framework for an urban visualization design space.

With relational perspectives, we examine the potential of traversing cultural collections along the richness of individual facets and relations through the process of developing an exploration-centered visualization. Cultural collections can contain thousands of artifacts, of which each typically possesses a diverse set of properties and individual facets constituting a unique relationship to the rest of the collection. Therefore, to create an appropriate representation of the complex data of each underlying artifact, oftentimes, it is not only interesting to get an overview of the entire collection from one perspective, but to explore the specific context of an artifact and the various relations it may have to other items. To investigate the potential of relational perspectives, we selected an art collection as a particularly promising case study. By following and reporting from a collaborative and iterative design process with an art museum, we developed a web interface that contrasts a collection overview with three situated visualizations each exposing a different kind of relational perspective on the art collection from an artifact.

This research investigates how people engage with data visualizations when commenting on the social platform Reddit. There has been considerable research on collaborative sensemaking with visualizations and the personal relation of people with data. Yet, little is known about how public audiences without specific expertise and shared incentives openly express their thoughts, feelings, and insights in response to data visualizations. Motivated by the extensive social exchange around visualizations in online communities, this research examines characteristics and motivations of people’s reactions to posts featuring visualizations. Following a Grounded Theory approach, we study 475 reactions from the /r/dataisbeautiful community, identify ten distinguishable reaction types, and consider their contribution to the discourse. A follow-up survey with 168 Reddit users clarified their intentions to react. Our results help understand the role of personal perspectives on data and inform future interfaces that integrate audience reactions into visualizations to foster a public discourse about data.

Digitale Sammlungen besitzen den Anspruch, die Sammlung in ihrer Gesamtheit zu veröffentlichen; sie entstammen ursprünglich intern erstellten und genutzten Datensätzen aus einem abgeschlossenen Sammlungsfundus; sie zeigen die Objekte nicht im Ausstellungsraum, sondern als einzelne Digitalisate; und sie ermöglichen eine Vielfalt an Zugängen. Trotz der zunehmenden Komplexität und Reichhaltigkeit der musealen digitalen Angebote und der damit anwachsenden Datensätze ist der Zugang zu diesen Sammlungsinterfaces noch oft auf Such- oder Filtermöglichkeiten und eine Anzeige über KachelBildergalerien beschränkt. Ausgehend davon, dass jede Repräsentation von Daten immer nur eine eingeschränkte Annäherung an eine objektive Wirklichkeit darstellen kann, ist die besondere Beleuchtung von Datensätzen unter unterschiedlichen Aspekten erstrebenswert. Neben gezielter Fokussierung auf einzelne Datendimensionen, halten wir in Bezug auf digitale Sammlungen kultureller Artefakte speziell den Wechsel zwischen unterschiedlichen Stufen von Distanz und Nähe für besonders ergiebig. Distanz und Nähe haben in Bezug auf Sammlungsvisualisierungen jeweils gänzlich unterschiedliche Qualitäten, welche die wissenschaftliche Exploration und das kulturelle Erleben der Sammlung bereichern können und beschreiben nicht nur besondere Arten der Betrachtung kultureller Bestände, sondern ebenso verschiedene Modi der Bewegung durch die digitale Sammlung, zwischen den Objekten und entlang ihrer Arrangements. Zwischen Distanz und Nähe liegen somit nicht nur verschiedene Granularitäten, sondern ebenso eine Vielfalt an Ansichten, die jeweils besondere Formen der Analyse und Erkenntnisgewinnung anregen.

Complementary to verbal explanations, visual techniques are often implemented in grammar instruction to help learners process information. Highlighting using typograhic features can help distinguish the structure in focus from its context, aiding information seeking and drawing attention to important features. Additionally, visual encoding can associate graphical traits to grammar categories to support the identification and recognition of related structures and language patterns.
An analysis of current grammar books for German as a foreign language has shown, however, that a combination of multiple encoding techniques representing coexistent grammar categories can be challenging to make sense of. The absence of a global design strategy within a book generates inconsistent and sometimes conflicting grammar representations, which can lead to misunderstandings and create a hindered and fragmented learning experience.
In order to avoid such conflicts, this research presents design guidelines to combine both techniques efficiently and introduces a visual system developed for German as a foreign language. In addition to indicating a word’s class, similar to Montessori Grammar Symbols, this system uses text appearance and symbols to indicate further grammar features relevant for non-native speakers, such as grammatical gender, case declension, verb tense, etc. By maintaining a consistent visual character, such support fosters structure recognition and comparison as well as pattern identification throughout all grammar representations. Initially developed for the German language, this systematic approach of associating grammar categories with visual features could be adapted to create new systems for other languages.

We propose the philosophical notion of the fold as an evocative vocabulary for the design and critique of interactive data visualizations. An expanding range of application areas, such as digital art history and literary studies, illustrates the potential of data visualization for research and education in the humanities. Coinciding with the increasing currency of data as evidence in the humanities, this research addresses a growing interest in data visualization for visual analysis and argumentation. For example, cultural collection visualizations promise a range of possibilities for visual and interactive representations of digital cultural heritage, used both for free exploration and focused research. Based on the concept of the fold, prominently advanced by Gilles Deleuze, this paper outlines a critical framework that draws attention towards the complexity of the underlying data. The fold offers a way to analyze and conceptualize visualizations through the lens of three integrated operations: explication, implication, and complication. It is an opportunity to think of interactive visualizations as portals into coherent, elastic, and ultimately infinite information spaces. Accordingly, it rejects the separation between interactivity and visual encoding and draws attention to the transitions between multiple states of a visualization. We identify design patterns of the fold in data visualizations, devise a framework for the critical interpretation of interactivity in data visualization, and demonstrate the implications for the digital humanities.

Through a design study, we develop an approach to data exploration that utilizes elastic visualizations designed to support varying degrees of detail and abstraction. Examining the notions of scalability and elasticity in interactive visualizations, we introduce a visualization of personal reading traces such as marginalia or markings inside the reference library of German realist author Theodor Fontane. To explore such a rich and extensive collection, meaningful visual forms of abstraction and detail are as important as the transitions between those states. Following a growing research interest in the role of fluid interactivity and animations between views, we are particularly interested in the potential of carefully designed transitions and consistent representations across scales. The resulting prototype addresses humanistic research questions about the interplay of distant and close reading with visualization research on continuous navigation along several granularity levels, using scrolling as one of the main interaction mechanisms. In addition to presenting the design process and resulting prototype, we present findings from a qualitative evaluation of the tool, which suggest that bridging between distant and close views can enhance exploration, but that transitions between views need to be crafted very carefully to facilitate comprehension.

Die Neukonzeption der Online-Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin ist eines der wichtigsten und umfassendsten Projekte innerhalb des Teilprojekts Visitor Journeys neu gedacht. Ziel ist es, die Objekte der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin auch im virtuellen Raum angemessen und zeitgemäß zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Forschungskooperation mit dem Urban Complexity Lab der Fachhochschule Potsdam ist Teil dieser Neukonzeption, indem sie die Möglichkeiten der Visualisierung und Exploration heterogener Sammlungsbestände untersucht. Mit Methoden aus dem Interfacedesign, der Human-Computer-Interaction und der Informationsvisualisierung wurden in einem interdisziplinären Team innovative und relevante Zugänge erforscht und prototypisch umgesetzt. Als Ziel wurde formuliert, dass die Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin in ihrer heterogenen Zusammensetzung erfasst und die verschiedenen Objektarten, Fachdisziplinen und Spezifika im Ganzen und im Detail visualisiert werden. So sollte ein Überblick über die Vielfalt der Bestände der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin verdeutlicht, aber auch ein Einstieg in die spezifischen Zusammensetzungen der Sammlungen ermöglicht werden.

Wir schlagen den philosophischen Begriff der Falte als Denkraum für die Gestaltung und Interpretation interaktiver Datenvisualisierungen vor. Visualisierungen geisteswissenschaftlicher Sammlungen bieten spannende Möglichkeiten für interaktive Repräsentationen, welche die Sammlungen und ihre zugrundeliegenden Objekte zugänglich machen, sie aber ebenso kritisch beleuchten sollten. Dies führt nicht selten zu komplexen und teils widersprüchlichen Anforderungen an die entstehenden Visualisierungen. Das von Gilles Deleuze ausgearbeitete Konzept der Falte eröffnet einen Denkraum, der die Aufmerksamkeit nicht nur auf die Vielfalt visueller Repräsentation, sondern auch auf die vermeintliche Objektivität der zugrundeliegenden Daten lenkt. Darüber hinaus bietet die Falte eine Möglichkeit, Visualisierungen durch die Linse von drei integrierten Operationen zu analysieren und zu konzeptualisieren: Explikation, Implikation und Komplikation. Durch diese Linse betrachtet werden interaktive Visualisierungen zu Portalen, welche Zugang zu kohärenten, elastischen und letztlich unendlichen Informationsräumen anbieten können.

In diesem anwendungsbezogenen Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekt werden systematisch forschungsorientiert das Aufbereiten, Bereitstellen und Analysieren von Massendaten für den Aufbau einer Forschungstechnologie für die Historische Netzwerkanalyse (HNA), die als ein Zweig der SNA historische Fragestellungen untersucht, erprobt.

With relational perspectives we explore the potential of a new type of approach for the exploration of cultural collections. Cultural collections can contain thousands of artifacts, of which each typically possesses a diverse set of properties constituting a unique relationship to the rest of the collection. Therefore, to create an appropriate representation of the complex data of each underlying artifact, oftentimes it is not only interesting to get an overview about the entire collection from one perspective, but to explore the particular context and relations of individual items. To investigate the potential of relational perspectives we selected an art collection as a particularly promising case study. By following a collaborative and iterative design process with an art museum, we developed a web interface that contrasts a collection overview with three perspective-dependent views to examine the viability of this approach and to expose the diversity of each artifact.

Der Beitrag stellt einen vom Theodor-Fontane-Archiv der Universität Potsdam in Kooperation mit der Fachhochschule Potsdam entwickelten Prototyp zur explorier- und skalierbaren Visualisierung einer Autor*innenbibliothek und der darin enthaltenen Lektürespuren vor. Ziel ist die Verbindung gestaltungsorientierter Ansätze zur Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen mit philologisch-, archiv- und bibliothekswissenschaftlichen Forschungsfragen. Das im Projekt entwickelte Visualisierungskonzept legt einen besonderen Fokus auf die kontinuierliche, auf mehreren Granularitätsebenen zoom- und filterbare Navigation innerhalb einer Autorenbibliothek, die die Erkundung einzelner Objekte ebenso zulässt wie deren Vergleich. Die Erfahr- und Erfassbarkeit der Sammlung als Ganzes und der sich in ihr abbildenden Lektüre- und Benutzungsmuster stehen dabei ebenso im Zentrum wie Zugänge zu Einzelphänomenen.

Digitale Technologien verändern nicht nur die Rezeptionsmöglichkeiten musealer Bestände im Kontext von digitalen Ausstellungen und Vermittlung, sie haben gleichzeitig zu einer methodischen Erweiterung geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung beigetragen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht in diesem Zusammenhang die Potenziale von Visualisierung für die kunstgeschichtliche Forschung, Lehre und Wissensvermittlung. Neben einer Begriffsklärung und Einführung in die Grundprinzipien computergestützter Visualisierungstechniken illustriert der Beitrag anhand von existierenden Beispielen aus der Praxis die erörterten Mechanismen und Anwendungsmöglichkeiten. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den Potenzialen, die Informationsvisualisierung für die Repräsentation und Rezeption von kunsthistorischen Daten und Bildquellen bereithält. Hierbei wird der Einsatz von Visualisierung als Analysemethode innerhalb eines Forschungs- und Erkenntnisprozesses sowie als Mittel zur Präsentation von Ergebnissen und bildgestützter Argumentation beschrieben.

We present a hybrid visualization technique that integrates maps into network visualizations to reveal and analyze diverse topologies in geospatial movement data. With the rise of GPS tracking in various contexts such as smartphones and vehicles there has been a drastic increase in geospatial data being collect for personal reflection and organizational optimization. The generated movement datasets contain both geographical and temporal information, from which rich relational information can be derived. Common map visualizations perform especially well in revealing basic spatial patterns, but pay less attention to more nuanced relational properties. In contrast, network visualizations represent the specific topological structure of a dataset through the visual connections of nodes and their positioning. So far there has been relatively little research on combining these two approaches. Shifted Maps aims to bring maps and network visualizations together as equals. The visualization of places shown as circular map extracts and movements between places shown as edges, can be analyzed in different network arrangements, which reveal spatial and temporal topologies of movement data. We implemented a web-based prototype and report on challenges and opportunities about a novel network layout of places gathered during a qualitative evaluation.

This research explores the merit of alternative arrangements of cultural artifacts to expose the aesthetic abundance of a cultural collection. The conventional display of museum objects in online interfaces tends to neglect the physical gestalt of the collection. For example, coins typically end up in tabular grids of thumbnail pages in online collections mimicking their rigid placement in storage drawers of a depot and glass cabinets in exhibitions. The overall aim behind this research was to devise visualizations that do justice to the material and semantic richness of an entire collection, while providing a casual mode of access that is inviting to people with no background in numismatics. To do this, we undertook an iterative design process, which involved a close collaboration with numismaticians and playful ideation with actual coins. Carefully negotiating expert knowledge and lay curiosity, the resulting visualization represents the collection’s dimensions using thousands of thumbnails as visual data points. The coins can be arranged into various layouts such as piles representing, for example, metal types, or streams visualizing the ebb and flow of coins over the centuries. In the interface, one can play with the coins in a manner that would be unthinkable in a physical exhibition and that has not been tried in a digital display. The article reports on the overall research and design process of this project, the resulting interface concept and prototype, and the feedback received during two evaluations.

After decades of digitization, large cultural heritage collections have emerged on the web, which contain massive stocks of content from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This increase in digital cultural heritage data promises new modes of analysis and increased levels of access for academic scholars and casual users alike. Going beyond the standard representations of search-centric and grid-based interfaces, a multitude of approaches has recently started to enable visual access to cultural collections, and to explore them as complex and comprehensive information spaces by the means of interactive visualizations. In contrast to conventional web interfaces, we witness a widening spectrum of innovative visualization types specially designed for rich collections from the cultural heritage sector. This new class of information visualizations gives rise to a notable diversity of interaction and representation techniques while lending currency and urgency to a discussion about principles such as serendipity, generosity, and criticality in connection with visualization design. With this survey, we review information visualization approaches to digital cultural heritage collections and reflect on the state of the art in techniques and design choices. We contextualize our survey with humanist perspectives on the field and point out opportunities for future research.

Wie sieht die Zukunft der Recherche in digitalen Bibliothekskatalogen aus? Wie können umfangreiche und heterogene Sammlungsbestände mit Hilfe von Datenvisualisierungen besser zugänglich gemacht werden? Kann man durch eine digitale Bibliothek flanieren und dabei den Bestand auf ganz neue Art entdecken? Diese Fragen standen im Zentrum eines Forschungsprojekts, das ein interdisziplinäres Team von Forscherinnen und Forschern des Urban Complexity Lab der FHP im vergangenen Jahr in Kooperation mit der DNB durchgeführt hat. Dieser Artikel stellt das Hauptergebnis des Projekts vor: DNBVIS, der Prototyp eines experimentellen Kataloginterfaces. Anschließend werden die Vorgehensweise und wichtigsten Erkenntnisse des Projekts zusammengefasst.

Das Versprechen hinter Digitalisierungsprojekten in sammelnden Institutionen ist oft die Erweiterung des Zugangs zum kulturellen Erbe, sei es für die Forschung oder im Sinne der Vermittlung. Bei kritischer Betrachtung fast aller Benutzerschnittstellen für Sammlungen scheint es aber an Ansätzen zu fehlen, reichhaltige Informationsräume einladend bereitzustellen. Diese Diskrepanz zwischen Digitalisierung von Sammlungen und ihrer digitalen Verfügbarmachung lässt sich dadurch begründen, dass Kultureinrichtungen selten über die nötige Kapazität verfügen, eigenständig Benutzerschnittstellen zu konzipieren und umzusetzen. Die Zielstellung des dreijährigen Forschungsprojektes Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen (VIKUS) an der Fachhochschule Potsdam1 war die Erforschung graphischer Benutzerschnittstellen zur explorativen Sichtung von Kulturobjekten. Im Projekt wurden in Kooperation mit Kultur- und Technologiepartnern Erkenntnisse zur visuellen Exploration digitalisierter Sammlungen gewonnen (Glinka et al. 2017a), die Entwicklung nachhaltiger Technologielösungen behandelt (Glinka et al. 2017b) und in experimentellen Settings kritisch-generative Methoden erprobt. Zu letzterem zählt die Übertragung der Forschungsfragen in den Kontext eines interdisziplinären Lehrformats, welches wir in unserem Beitrag diskutieren. Wir gehen insbesondere auf den produktiven Zusammenhang zwischen Kritik und Konzeption von Informationsvisualisierungen ein und zeigen auf, welche Potenziale ein bewusster Bruch mit disziplinären Konventionen und Sehgewohnheiten mit sich bringt.

As cultural institutions are digitizing their artifacts and interlinking their collections, new opportunities emerge to engage with cultural heritage. However, it is the often comprehensive and complex nature of collections that can make it difficult to grasp their distribution and extent across a variety of dimensions. After a brief introduction to the research area of collection visualizations, this paper presents a design study visualizing an aggregated collection from diverse cultural institutions in Germany. We detail our iterative design process leading to prototypical implementations of four stylistically and functionally coordinated visualizations, each one focusing on different facets of the collection.

With the proliferation of personal and social computing there is an increased interest in the field of human-computer interaction to support people’s memory practises. Yet, there is only a limited understanding of the role of artefacts in the social dynamics in memory. With memory dialogue, we introduce a methodology for exploring artefact-based memory sharing. Participants created physical or digital memory artefacts, exchanged them, and reflected on the process. Our qualitative findings show how this method can help uncover the complexity of shared memory. Participants largely chose bonding experiences and created artefacts as conversation starters about differences in their memories.

Museums are broadening their program beyond the physical institutions by providing digital collections online. In digital collections, objects are prepared and presented particularly for the Web and the ambition is to provide the entirety of a physical collection. To make these rich and comprehensive data sets accessible, an explore mode is increasingly offered. The present study considers this mode, first by making sense of the term “exploration” and suggesting four functional principles in support of exploration in digital collections — view, movement, contextualization, and participation. On this basis, we compare eight well-known museums with regard to the explore modes for their digital collections. We have devised a three-part methodology, reverse information architecture, to address the question: How is the function of exploration manifested in the structure and interface elements of digital collections? With this unique method we use the given content to investigate how far the four principles are implemented in explore modes of digital collections and, broadly said, how explorable they are. The introduced approach to studying digital collections could be opened up to other fields to analyze a variety of Web interfaces in general.

Die Entwicklung digitaler Werkzeuge lässt sich als wichtiger Teilbereich in den Digital Humanities identifizieren (Davis und Kräutli 2015; Schnapp et al. 2009). Entsprechende Forschung und Projektarbeit steht dabei komplexen Herausforderungen gegenüber. Nicht nur die Frage nach verfügbaren Daten, methodologischer Fundierung und technologischer Umsetzbarkeit, sondern auch die Frage nach deren langfristigen Verfügbarmachung sind wiederkehrende Themen der letzten Jahre. Eine zentrale Rolle für die Sicherstellung von Qualität und Anwendbarkeit der digitalen Werkzeuge ist die Einbindung von Forscher_innen der jeweiligen geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen im Entwicklungsprozess (Drucker 2013). Gleichzeitig lässt sich die zentrale Bedeutung von Interfacedesign, Nutzungsanleitungen und Benutzerfreundlichkeit als wichtige Faktoren für die Etablierung von digitalen Werkzeugen im Forschungsprozess feststellen (Gibbs und Owens 2012). Doch selbst wenn diese Herausforderungen bewältigt werden und ein digitales Werkzeug (erfolgreich) entwickelt wurde, stellt sich weiterhin die Frage, wie die langfristige Nachnutzung im Sinne einer digitalen Nachhaltigkeit sichergestellt werden kann. Am Beispiel des Entstehungsprozesses einer sammlungsspezifischen Visualisierung und deren Weiterentwicklung zu einem nachnutzbaren Werkzeug werden einige zentrale Aspekte der beeinflussenden Faktoren und Lösungsansätze vorgestellt. Unser Beitrag stellt sich somit der Frage, wie sichergestellt werden kann, dass digitale Tools auch über die Laufzeit von Förderprojekten hinaus (und unabhängig von spezifischen Use-cases) dauerhaft nutzbar und weiterentwickelbar sind.

Museen erweitern ihr Vermittlungsangebot immer mehr über die physische Einrichtung hinaus, u.a. durch die Bereitstellung Digitaler Sammlungen im Web. Digitale Sammlungen zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass die in ihnen gezeigten Objekte speziell für das Web aufbereitet und präsentiert werden. Der Anspruch besteht dabei darin, die Gesamtheit der musealen Sammlungen zur Verfügung zu stellen. Um diese umfassenden Datensätze zugänglich und ein Schlendern durch die Bestände zu ermöglichen, wird innerhalb der Digitalen Sammlungen zunehmend ein sogenannter Explore-Modus angeboten. Auf der Basis einer Untersuchung des Begriffes der Exploration wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit acht bekannte Museen im Hinblick auf die Explore-Modi ihrer Digitalen Sammlungen miteinander verglichen und analysiert. Es wurde eine dreiteilige Methode mit dem Namen Reverse Information Architecture entwickelt, um die folgende Frage zu beantworten: Wie manifestiert sich die Funktion der Exploration in der Struktur und den Interface-Elementen der Digitalen Sammlungen? Mit der entwickelten Methode wird der Inhalt der Websites analysiert, um zu untersuchen, inwiefern Konzepte der Exploration in den Digitalen Sammlungen umgesetzt werden.

This work is part of ongoing research on the visualization of spatial relationships in fictional works. Our aim is to arrive at aesthetic representations of fictional narratives set in actual places such as cities. Novel City Maps offers two map views, one inspired by transit maps and the other by conventional street maps. The former uses the aesthetic of abstract transit maps to reveal the co-occurrence structures between important places in a story. The street map view is designed as a spatial fingerprint of a novel by highlighting the places occurring often in the story.

In this paper we examine the concept of staged analysis through a case study on visualizing urban mobility exhibited in a public gallery space. Recently, many cities introduced bike-sharing in order to promote cycling among locals and visitors. We explore how citizens can be guided from evocative impressions of bicycling flows to comparative analysis of three bike-sharing systems. The main aim for visualizations in exhibition contexts is to encourage a shift from temporary interest to deeper insight into a complex phenomenon. To pursue this ambition we introduce cf. city flows, a comparative visualization environment of urban bike mobility designed to help citizens casually analyze three bike-sharing systems in the context of a public exhibition space. Multiple large screens show the space of flows in bike-sharing for three selected world cities: Berlin, London, and New York. Bike journeys are represented in three geospatial visualizations designed to be progressively more analytical, from animated trails to small-multiple glyphs. In this paper, we describe our design concept and process, the exhibition setup, and discuss some of the insights visitors gained while interacting with the visualizations.

In this article we present a case study on digital representation of the art historical research and metadata brought together for a scientific collection catalogue by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. The resulting interface aims at linking the structure and texture of a collection of drawings by Frederick William IV of Prussia (1795–1861) with additional contextual information. The article describes the context of the larger research project and presents the resulting visualization and interaction techniques specifically designed for dynamic exploration along time and subjects.

Culturegraphy visualizes the exchange of cultural information over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development such as movie references. All findings were made in a process that involved network scientists, a media theorist, and a sociologist. The role that visualization can play in bridging scientific communities was central to this work. In this sense, the resulting visualizations were process to bring researchers from different disciplines together. Traditionally using different methods, physicists increasingly ask similar questions as media theorists or sociologists as they study the dynamics in networks. Visualization can serve as a common language that brings fields together, shows differences, but also has its own idiosyncratic views.

Das computergestützte Extrahieren und Visualisieren von Emotionen in Texten ist eine etablierte Technik des “Distant Reading”. Die generelle Stimmung eines Textes kann schnell erfasst werden ohne den gesamten Text lesen zu müssen. Da Emotionen sehr komplex und die Eigenschaften zwischen verschiedenen Emotionen fließend sind, ist die visuelle Charakterisierung von Emotionen schwierig. Wir stellen Emosaic vor, ein Online-Tool welches Emotionen aus benutzerdefinierten Texten filtert und durch systematische und nachvollziehbare Farbumwandlung zur Exploration und Analyse innerhalb einer interaktiven Visualisierung bereitstellt. Die durch drei Dimensionen beschreibbaren Emotionen werden dabei in klar definierte Farbparameter übersetzt. Ein von uns entwickelter öffentlich zugänglicher Web-Prototyp zeigt anhand interaktiver Visualisierungen erste Analyse- und Explorationsmöglichkeiten dieser Methode (http://emosaic.de).

We present “archival liveness” as a concept in design and the Digital Humanities and describe its development within a Research Through Design process. Working with a newly acquired archive of contemporary poetry we produced designs that both manifested and “geared in to” [Durrant 2011] [Gurwitsch 1979] the temporal rhythms of the work and infrastructure of archiving. Drawing on user-centred work with participants, often poets themselves, we focused on marginalia as a material feature of the archive, developing a drawing machine and live Twitter bot. Our work addresses institutional concerns for outreach and engagement while also acknowledging and exploiting the inevitably incomplete or live character of archival collections. For designers working with digital archives, we demonstrate the pragmatic and critical value of liveness as a focus of the design process.

Im Rückgriff auf Ausstellungspraktiken im Museum stellt der Artikel Bezüge zwischen Erkenntnissen aus der Visualisierungsforschung und der Rezeption von Museumssammlungen in einem Ausstellungsdisplay her. Besondere Beachtung finden hierbei Makro- und Mikroperspektiven auf Sammlungen und Darstellungen im (digitalen) Display eines Museums. Visualisierungen können einen offenen und explorativen Zugang zu den digitalisierten Beständen bieten, der eher den Ausstellungs- und Vermittlungsaktivitäten des Museums entspricht oder diese ergänzt. Dabei werden die Potenziale der digitalen Präsentation herausgearbeitet und Anhand von Use Cases aus der Forschung illustriert, welche Ansätze in der facettierten und „kuratierten“ Inszenierung von Sammlungen umgesetzt werden können.

We introduce a set of integrated interaction techniques to interpret and interrogate dimensionality-reduced data. Projection techniques generally aim to make a high-dimensional information space visible in form of a planar layout. However, the meaning of the resulting data projections can be hard to grasp. It is seldom clear why elements are placed far apart or close together and the inevitable approximation errors of any projection technique are not exposed to the viewer. Previous research on dimensionality reduction focuses on the efficient generation of data projections, interactive customisation of the model, and comparison of different projection techniques. There has been only little research on how the visualization resulting from data projection is interacted with. We propose a set of interactive visualization methods to examine the dimensionality-reduced data as well as the projection itself. The methods let viewers see approximation errors, question the positioning of elements, compare them to each other, and visualize the influence of data dimensions on the projection space. We created a web-based system implementing these methods, and report on findings from an evaluation with data analysts using the prototype to examine multidimensional datasets.

At the intersection of information visualization and typography lies the design space of micro visualization, a family of basic techniques enriching text in regard of its accessibility, comprehensibility, and memorability. We propose a taxonomy that differentiates specific types of visualizations applied to text design and layout. We elaborate two main approaches to aligning the visual appearance of a text and its content. The first explores the addition of graphical elements embedded into or adjacent to a text, while the other approach explores the visual modification of a text by means of typographic visualization. For this we evaluate how different techniques can be used as visual variables.

In recent years, access to cultural heritage has been closely connected to digitisation. We argue the case for recognising this digital shift as an opportunity to create interfaces to cultural heritage that are, first of all, more inviting to the public. Secondly, we want to encourage critical approaches towards the representation of cultural production and allow for alternative or even conflicting narratives and interpretations to surface. We present related work, use cases, and concepts for visualisations and interfaces that invite the reconsideration of modes of categorisation, presentation and clustering. Our intent is to develop ways to scrutinise modes of exclusion, carry out critical evaluations and pursue interventional strategies. We discuss the specific potential of visualisation, annotation and dynamic expansion of digital cultural collections. Building on critical approaches in human-computer interaction, visualisation and cultural theories, we explore how the interface could be a means of reflection, critique and inclusion.

Text visualisations provide visual representations of documents or small corpora with the primary aim of supporting language analysis. We are interested in developing a more playful approach to language that can be characterised by the notion of wandering as an open-ended movement. To support such a casual form of engagement with text, we designed the WordWanderer system: a visualisation technique that extends tag clouds into a navigational interface for text. The tool supports the gradual movement between word ‘context views’, which represent the words that co-occur in the vicinity of the selected word, and word-‘comparison views’, which arrange words based on their association strengths between two selected words. We report on the encouraging feedback from a ten-day deployment of the interface and present promising directions for future design and research.

Network log files often need to be investigated manually for suspicious activity. The huge amount of log lines complicates maintaining an overview, navigation and quick pattern identification. We propose a system that uses an interactive visualization, a visual filter, representing the whole log in an overview, allowing to navigate and make context-preserving subselections with the visualization and in this way reducing the time and effort for security experts needed to identify patterns in the log file. This explorative interactive visualization is combined with focused querying to search for known suspicious terms that are then highlighted in the visualization and the log file itself.

We created a pixel map for multi-variate data based on an analysis of the needs of network security engineers. Parameters of a log record are shown as pixels and these pixels get stacked to represent a record. This allows a broad view of a data set on one screen while staying very close to the raw data and to expose common and rare patterns of user behavior through the visualization itself (the “Carpet”). Visualizations that immediately point to areas of suspicious activity without requiring extensive fltering, help network engineers investigating unknown computer security incidents. Most of them, however, have limited knowledge of advanced visualization techniques, while many designers and data scientists are unfamiliar with computer security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed visualizations together with engineers, following a co-creative process. We will show how we explored the scope of the engineers’ tasks and how we jointly developed ideas and designs. Our expert evaluation indicates that this visualization helps to scan large parts of log fles quickly and to defne areas of interest for closer inspection.

Culturegraphy visualizes cultural information exchange over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development. The graphics represent complex relationships of movie references by combining macro views summarizing 100 years of movie influences with micro views providing a close-up look at the embedding of individual movies. The macro view shows the rise of the self-referential character of postmodern cinema, while the micro level illustrates differences between individual movies, when they were referenced and by whom. The visualizations provide views that are closer to the real complexity of the relationships than aggregated views or rankings could do.

Monadic exploration is a new approach to interacting with relational information spaces that challenges the distinction between the whole and its parts. Building on the work of sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour we turn to the concept of the monad as a useful lens on online communities and collections that expands the possibility for creating meaning in their navigation. While existing interfaces tend to emphasize either the structure of the whole or details of a part, monadic exploration brings these opposing perspectives closer together in continuous movements between partially overlapping points of view. We present a visualization that reflects a given node’s relative position within a network using radial displacements and visual folding. To investigate the potential of monadic exploration we report on an iterative design process of a web-based visualization of a highly cross-referenced book and its six-month deployment.

A photo archive contains diverse narratives that only get partially exposed in digital interfaces. In this paper we explore a potential framework for archivists and designers to create photo archive interfaces that are sensitive to the ethos and social context of its content. We outline our approach to engaging with archival projects and present the results of a pilot workshop, which raised a range of complex questions about the design of visual interfaces. Our aim is to practically and conceptually expand how a visual interface would let a visitor access, explore, and interpret the contents of an archive. To do this we are interested in the different associations that people weave between the artefacts of an archive.

We present a visualization of subject headings that typically accompany books as flat textual metadata. The purpose of the visualization is twofold: first to expose the implicit structure in subject headings as an overview of a library collection and second to present a visual web of keywords to invite exploration of books. Taking a tag cloud as a starting point, the visualization extends it to a networked tag cloud that respects the hierarchy that is implicit in subject headings. By allowing an information seeker to successively build a subject filter, while seeing the results at each step, we hope to improve the searcher’s orientation in a comprehensive book collection.

In this paper we offer a critical discussion of data visualization by adapting theories of indexicality as discussed in semiotics and art history. An indexical statement is broadly one whose meaning is dependent on context. We examine how indexicality has informed practices in cinema, photography, and contemporary art and make comparisons with data visualization. Specifically, we explore how these analogies can result in generative concepts that can inform the design and study of data visualization.

As information visualization is increasingly used to raise awareness about social issues, difficult questions arise about the power of visualization. So far the research community has not given sufficient thought to how values and assumptions pervade information visualization. Taking engaging visualizations as a starting point, we outline a critical approach that promotes disclosure, plurality, contingency, and empowerment. Based on this approach, we pose some challenges and opportunities for visualization researchers and practitioners.

We present a new method for displaying visualization parameters to guide casual data exploration. When visualizing datasets with large parameter spaces it can be difficult to move between data views. Building on social navigation and degree-of-interest visualization, we propose the concept of accentuation as the selection and emphasis of visualization parameters based on social and semantic signals. We describe how we designed an accentuated visualization interface, and discuss open challenges and directions for future research.