From people to pixels : visualizing historical university records

Abstract

The world’s oldest universities have started digitizing their historical student/staff records. Such data collections have the potential to provide valuable insights into the early educated population’s social and cultural profile and inform research regarding the formation of academic networks. While textual, web-based search interfaces provide universal access to these collections for scholars and the general public, they can only provide narrow views on a record-by-record basis. This article presents and critically discusses a pilot study which uses an off-the-shelf visualization tool as a means to enable the interactive exploration of patterns within the Biographical Register of the University of St Andrews (1747–1897) (BRUSA). Our visualizations provide insights into the history of the University unobtainable through close reading and at the same time highlight the limitations of standard visualization tools when used in the context of diverse historical records. Drawing from ongoing advances in visualization and digital humanities (DH) research, we examine our pilot study by focusing on two main issues: (1) How to make visible the situatedness of historical (biographical) record collections? (2) How to inform the critical interpretation of cultural collections through visualization?