Graphical Expressions of Humanistic Interpretation in Digital Environments

Humanists have adopted visualization techniques with enthusiasm in recent years, borrowing display formats from quantitative approaches rooted in social and natural sciences. But are the standard metrics and conventions developed for analysis of empirical inquiries fundamentally at odds with tenets of traditional humanistic interpretation? How are complexity, contradiction, uncertainty, ambiguity, and other basic features of interpretative activity to be given graphical expression? Does the introduction of affect into visual displays simply shift all visualization towards idiosyncratic and subjective approaches that lack clear legibility? Or can we imagine conventions that might introduce some of the necessary qualifications and variables essential to creating graphical expressions of humanistic interpretation?

Featured speaker: Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA where her research focuses in modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, and the history of visual information design. Her teaching interests include the history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation.

Moderator: Kurt Fendt is director of HyperStudio, MIT̢