Visualization and the Humanities: Towards a Shared Research Agenda (Dagstuhl Seminar 23381)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 23381 "Visualization and the Humanities: Towards a Shared Research Agenda". The seminar was motivated by the fact that visualization has become a vital element in (digital) humanist research practices recently, while the value and impact of research at the intersection of visualization and the humanities is still widely debated and frequently contested from both sides. Visualization scholars critique the service-oriented focus on visualization as a tool to facilitate humanist research, which hampers the discovery of complementary and mutually enriching research perspectives for all fields involved. At the same time, humanists warn of visualizations' roots in the quantitative sciences which introduce non-trivial shifts in the topology of knowledge-power, creating epistemic, political, ethical, pedagogical, and cultural tensions. Building on advances in this young and highly interdisciplinary research area, the seminar discussed how to leverage synergies and how to build productively on tensions between methodologies at the intersection of visualization and (digital) humanities fields that span a vast spectrum of research philosophies and methods. The seminar thus brought together researchers and practitioners from the fields of visualization, computer science, the humanities, and design to reflect on existing research methods within visualization and the humanities, to identify tensions and synergies between the different fields, and to develop concrete avenues that address and leverage these.