The fold is a theory-driven research project that examines the role of interactivity in data visualization within the digital humanities. This work builds on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who interpreted Leibniz’ monadology anew in his work “The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque.” Extending this line of thought speculatively into the realm of digital information spaces, we transfer Deleuze’s notion of the fold to data visualization and derive qualities for humanistic visualization design and critique.
When visualizing humanistic data, it can be challenging to arrive at interactive visual representations that are meaningful and insightful, and enable a diverse set of user tasks from explorative engagement to focused analysis. Furthermore, visual information tends to be perceived as “true,” which has already sparked a debate over the role of the humanities in the design and interpretation of visualizations, understanding data as interpretive and calling for more ambiguity in their graphical expression. We propose the notion of the fold, advanced by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as a new way of interpreting and creating interactive visualizations of complex information spaces. The fold sheds light on the complexity of the underlying data and offers a new perspective on knowledge systems and their representation. While written in dense philosophical prose, the concept of the fold and the associated operations—explication, implication, and complication—can serve as an illuminating lens on visual interfaces and their interactive capabilities. More specifically, we believe that the fold offers an evocative design and research vocabulary for the digital humanities that considers visual encoding and interaction aspects in unison.
With this research we transfer Deleuze’s notion of the fold to data visualization and derive three concrete qualities for visualization design and critique in the humanities: coherence, elasticity, and infinity. In a next step, we characterize the manifestation of the fold’s operations and qualities in a range of exemplary visualizations with the help of interpretive illustrations and concrete examples from digital humanities projects. Lastly, we formulate a critical framework consisting of principles and questions for the design and interpretation of interactive visualizations and discuss open questions for future work at the intersection of data visualization design and humanistic inquiry. The fold has guided our visualization projects within the digital humanities for the last few years, enabling us to look more closely at the relationship between interactivity, visual encoding and the multiple states of a visualization and providing us with a new design and research vocabulary.