HistoGraph -- A Visualization Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Networks from Historical Social Multimedia Collections

Abstract

Abstract-This paper describes the design and development of histoGraph, an interactive tool for explorative visualization and collaborative investigation of historical social networks from multimedia collections. Developed in an interdisciplinary collaboration of computer scientists, historians, HCI researchers and interface designers, the tool aims at supporting historians in the discovery and historical analysis of relationships between people, places and events. A special focus is on the identification and interactive visualization of social relations from historical photo collections through a combination of automatic analysis and expert-based crowdsourcing. The tool design bridges the gap between established network analysis and visualization techniques and traditional hermeneutic research methods in historical research. It integrates visual exploration with hybrid social graph construction, hypothesis formulation and the consultation of digitized primary sources. A formative evaluation of the current prototype, developed as a domainspecific application for historians in the field of European integration points to opportunities and critical factors in applying this approach to support and further current research practices in digital humanities.

Visualization of Cultural Heritage Collection Data: State of the Art and Future Challenges

“…Moreover, the content of objects can be treated as data and processed or analyzed to derive additional metadata and better organize the visualized collection. Examples of applied techniques include text mining [53], [55], [56], clustering of 3D objects based on shape similarity [54], image analysis for face recognition [57], average color abstraction [52], style, genre and artist classification [58], or clustering [59]. Fig.…”

“…A minor amount of papers also claimed to support collaboration [54], [57], [65], [66], [67] and communication [66], [68], [69], [70]. As an early example, [54] emphasized the potential collaboration of different CH institutions in developing CH databases.…”

“…Given the importance of interacting with individual objects in CH databases for sensemaking, it is not surprising that this is the most frequent task category. Only a few approaches also tackle relation-seeking tasks (e.g., [56], [57]).…”

Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

“…Figure 1 shows a mock-up of Storyteller. 7 The tool visualizes connections between events that happen over time and participants in these events. Events are divided into groups, based on data set-specific properties.…”

“…Visualizations in digital humanities often represent the results of complex algorithms running on 'big data' from the humanities domain. Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data is an essential instrument to communicate their research results and to evoke scholarly debates as well as public interest [7] [10] [5]. The disciplinary characteristics of both scholarly practices and data in the humanities, however, offer a challenge for visualization techniques.…”