Abstract:
Digitization puts cultural print collections such as literary or historical texts at our fingertips. It makes possible large-scale analyses, revealing new insights about entire genres, archives, or time periods, and enables direct access and engagement with even rare works of interest across the world. However, current digitization approaches largely focus on the content of print collections, neglecting their visual, physical and material qualities. This also influences the design of interfaces to digital archives that mostly feature keyword searches and item lists. This is a problem as the way in which we present data (about cultural collection and in general) greatly influences the types of questions that get asked and the way we (critically) engage with it.
How can we transform cultural print collections into digital space, enabling their large-scale exploration while providing access to their unique visual, physical, and material characteristics?
In this talk, I will discuss challenges and opportunities for designing visualizations and visual interfaces that embrace digital media as an opportunity to transform creatively – not replicate – print collections in ways that reflect both their content and physical presence. I will illustrate this discussion with different case studies that utilize visualization as a research process to re-think digital representations of cultural collections.
Biography: Uta Hinrichs
Uta Hinrichs is a Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, specializing in Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). She received her PhD in Computer Science with specialization in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary, Canada. Heavily drawing form fields outside of Computer Science (e.g., Design, Literary Studies, and Information Sciences), Uta’s research is driven by the question of how to facilitate insightful, pleasurable and critical interactions with information in physical and digital spaces. As a visualization researcher Uta has been involved in number of collaborations with artists, historians, and literary scholars which have fuelled her interest in the role of visualization as part of humanities research and practice. Her research has been presented and published at academic venues spanning the fields of Visualization, HCI, Literary Studies, and Digital Humanities, as well as, museums, libraries, and art galleries.