Visualization
The digital humanities emerged from text. Text-based work is still the predominant form of digital humanities scholarship. However, data visualization, enabled by computational techniques, and visual analysis and data exploration through visualizations are increasingly employed in humanities research. Consequently, many digital humanities areas are developing substantial visual components. Such components are evident in research in art, architectural history studies, museum studies, archaeology, and cultural heritage, but are gaining importance for other humanities areas as well. In addition to data visualization, image analysis, wherein patterns are detected in large collections of images, perception-based techniques, particularly important in analyzing architectural objects, spatial modelling and 3D reconstruction of historical objects, and other types of visualization now have applications to the humanities. Consequently, many digital humanities research questions depend on the utilization and production of graphical, visual information (Münster & Terras, 2020).
Visual analytics is a new discipline that focuses on the integration of computer visualizations, human interaction with these visualizations, data exploration, and leveraging human cognitive abilities to gain new understandings and insights from the visualized data. Some recent work in the digital humanities has incorporated visual analytics for research into humanities questions. In recent work on visual data exploration, a visual analytics system was designed for navigating the content of large digital historical document corpora. The system incorporates new techniques in dynamic multilayer network visualization. It was designed to make these visualizations accessible for humanities scholars who are not experts in data analysis and visualization, but whose work can nevertheless benefit from visualizing and analyzing networks showing the linkages, for example, among different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections (Bornhofen & Düring, 2020). Other recent visual analytics applications to the digital humanities include interactive data exploration for researching historical linguistics (Butt & Beck, 2020), visualization of event-based networks to investigate connections between disparate entities and the resulting historical narratives (Filipov et al., 2021), and visual text analysis combined with statistical analysis for uncovering interesting knowledge associations and groups of common interests between researchers and practitioners in working in different research areas (Benito-Santos & Therón Sánchez, 2020).
For advancing digital humanities scholarship, new directions may be taken in which innovative ideas are drawn from areas not normally associated with computation, such as postmodern philosophy. For instance, because of the increasing importance of data visualization in the digital humanities, including digital art history, literary st