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From people to pixels : visualizing historical university records

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2_a_48_PN_Vancisin.pdf (14.34Mb)
Date
19/04/2018
Author
Vancisin, Tomas
Crawford, Alice
Orr, Mary Margaret
Hinrichs, Uta
Keywords
Visualization
Digital Humanities
Historic University Records
Cultural Collections
Tableau Desktop
History
AM Museums (General). Collectors and collecting (General)
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
NDAS
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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?
Citation
Vancisin , T , Crawford , A , Orr , M M & Hinrichs , U 2018 , From people to pixels : visualizing historical university records . in Transimage 2018 : Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference 2018 . pp. 41-57 , Transimage 2018 , Edinburgh , United Kingdom , 19/04/18 . https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6104699
 
conference
 
Publication
Transimage 2018
DOI
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6104699
Type
Conference item
Rights
Copyright the Authors 2018. Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, version 4.0. For details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13187

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