My last session at MARAC provided me with a lot of food for thought as I head back to my organization. Alison Langmead a professor at the University of Pittsburg pushed the audience to consider where archivists should insert themselves in the field of data visualization. The most compelling part of her argument for me was to leverage DV as a tool to better represent and display collection data. For example, we could leverage the EAD finding aid to share with researchers all of our materials about a particular time period or event through DV.
It is perhaps not our job to spearhead Digital Humanities projects, but rather continue to increase the discoverability of our collections to then pave the way to work with faculty members to develop these projects.
DV could help us:
Explore new ways of conveying pre existing knowledge
Convey new types of knowledge
Present information in a more efficient or effective method
We could all the user to take the reigns when considering how we display our content.
Alison shared Ben Fry’s phases of DV:
Acquisition
Parse
Filter
Mine
Represent
Refine
Interact
I’m interested to know what data visualization archivists are working on? And what is your role in the project?