Tag Archives: Sydney

Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities

3D and game editors, Academic, Digital Humanities, Presentation, virtual heritage,

My talk for tomorrow’s dh2015.org conference at UWS, Sydney is entitled:
Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities.
The presentation examines how

  1. More emphasis has been on scientific visualisation, on non-interactive calculation and presentation of quantifiable data but Digital Humanities Visualisation is not only about data, but can also be interactive. vague, questioning and rhetorical.
  2. Visualisation is not only pretty, (refer Baldwin, S. 2013. The Idiocy of the Digital Literary (and what does it have to do with digital humanities)? digital humanities quarterly (dhq) [Online], 7. Available: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000155/000155.html [Accessed 14 March 2014]). It can help solve and not just communicate research problems.
  3. Visualisation has to overcome ocularcentrism as Virtual Reality reflects not only sighted reality but non-sighted reality, visualisation is more than just the visual (explain using cave paintings!)
  4. Game design is not typically part of Digital Humanities but it is an interesting vehicle for community feedback, cultural issues, critical reflection and medium-specific techniques (such as procedural rhetoric-see last post).
  5. I will discuss visualisation in terms of game engines for history and heritage, hybrid pano-tables, learning via inventories and maps, NPC driven narrative, indirect personalisation (biofeedback), and active speaker as embedded and embodied characters inside environments.
  6. There are huge issues, HCI, authenticity, developing scholarly arguments in collaboration, preservation, etc.)
  7. So if the above is not Digital Humanities what is it? It employs research in the traditional humanities, converts IT people to humanities research (sometimes), helps preserves and communicates cultural heritage and cultural significance through alterity, cultural constraints and counterfactual imaginings. History and heritage is not always literature! And the DH audience is not always literature-focused or interested in traditional forms of literacy.