A small sample of cool digital humanities info visualization projects & tools

A handful of interesting projects, lesson plans, and tools for digital humanities information visualization (aka infoviz, sometimes aka data visualization).

• Tutorials for making introductory information visualizations with the Processing language ("a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts")
• We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar is a visualization project that scrapes current social media posts to explore human emotion in visually beautiful ways, and it's always been a hit with my students (the hard part is when they want to build something like it!). I couldn't get it to load in my browser this week, so it may no longer work.
  • "The web's secret stories" TED talk discusses building the project.
• Miriam Posner on
• how to get started making a humanities network visualization
• using visualization to explore an archive of historical medical photographs (some good research ethics questions here)
• "A fun way to introduce DH students to dataviz" lesson
• "Getting started with Palladio" ("Palladio, a product of Stanford's Humanities+Design Lab, is a web-based visualization tool for complex humanities data.")
• Johanna Drucker's "Humanities Approaches to Visual Display"
• Neatline (a platform for telling stories with maps and timelines)
• The Gephi dataviz tool (note that you'll probably need to download the 0.8.1beta version instead of the latest; I couldn't get the latest to run on my Mac)
• I have several blog posts on introductory use of Gephi for data visualizations on my LiteratureGeek.com blog
• "The complete n00b's guide to Gephi"
• Scott Weingart on when not to use networks (good for a student discussion on getting past the "prettiness" factor of visualizations)
• Ben Fry does a bunch of cool infoviz work, including this timelapse viz of changes in the various editions of Darwin's On the Origin of Species
• Ben Schmidt's work, including changing language in State of the Union addresses and whaling routes, visualizing image collections and trends in collections of digitized texts