Implementing data visualization tools in digital humanities work brings another method of displaying and analyzing knowledge. It takes the 0s and 1s and turns them into qualitative projects or reports. With a closer look, one could also see that digital humanities exposes (or has started to expose) the myth of independent and objective data. Johanna Drucker explores this discussion in their article, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Drucker analyzes the term “data” itself, along with its many assumptions, noting that data visualization tools will only truly work if there is a humanities approach to their usage. “The rendering of statistical information into graphical form gives it a simplicity and legibility that hides every aspect of the original interpretative framework on which the statistical data were constructed.” Data must, therefore, be understood not as it has been purported to be, infallible and independent, but transformed into “capta,” information that is taken and constructed. Drucker believes that essentially, “all data have to be understood as capta and the conventions created to express observer-independent models of knowledge need to be radically reworked to express humanistic interpretation.”
In their work, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Digital Visualization, and James Hemmings,” Lauren F. Klein also tackles the use of data visualization tools in the digital humanities. These digital visualization tools, the author notes, can address the issue of “archival silence.” “Drawing instead on digital methods, this essay demonstrates how a set of techniques that derive from the fields of computational linguistics and data visualization help render visible the archival silences implicit in our understanding [of chattel slavery today].” Klein believes that reframing the structure of knowing and understanding can contribute to this deconstruction and reconstruction that is necessary to move forward. Utilizing digital visualization tools can reveal the “ghosts” of the archive, who represent the condition of social death.
Amber Sophia 