Lorentz Workshop

We are organizing a workshop at the Lorentz center. It will be hosted at June 19–23, 2017 and is titled Visualizing Digital Humanities.

Aims

This workshop brings together experts from the fields of Geometric Algorithms, Visual Analytics, the Library Sector, and the field of Digital Humanities, in order to develop state-of-the-art visual techniques for librarians and scholars in the humanities. We will identify and describe new areas of application for researchers working in Visual Analytics and formulate objectives and use cases that will result in visualizations satisfying the needs of librarians and humanities scholars. The workshop has three goals:

  1. inform librarians and humanities scholars about advanced visualization techniques allowing them to manage, present, and analyze large quantities of (bibliographic) data
  2. identify problems faced by librarians and humanities scholars that can be overcome by using advanced visualization and visual analytics techniques
  3. discuss and evaluate existing visualization techniques to determine whether they meet the needs of librarians and researchers in the humanities.

At the end of the workshop, we will have identified a set of research problems and objectives guiding future work of the participants, and we will have created a platform for future collaborations.

Context

Libraries provide online access to millions and millions of bibliographic records and digitized texts. Scholars in the field of Digital Humanities analyze these records and texts using computational tools. The field of Visual Analytics provides cutting-edge, interactive visual representations, allowing users to extract meaning from large datasets. Librarians, scholars in Digital Humanities, and researchers working in Visual Analytics would thus profit immensely from mutual collaboration. However, such collaboration is not very common. Librarians and humanities scholars often use basic visualizations that are a far cry from state-of-the-art research solutions in Visual Analytics. In addition, it is not always clear how advanced visualizations can help librarians and scholars in the humanities to solve problems relating to data management and analysis. This workshop will bring together international experts working in these different domains, to identify the challenges faced by librarians and humanities scholars and to identify visual techniques that will allow them to solve these challenges.

Organizers

The workshop will be organized by

  • OCLC, a global library cooperative and developer of Worldcat, the world’s largest bibliographic database. OCLC will involve the world's leading experts on library data management and research (Titia van der Werf, Senior Program Officer).
  • The Applied Geometric Algorithms group in the Dep. of Mathematics and Computer Science of TU Eindhoven, headed by Prof. dr. Bettina Speckmann. This group will involve leading experts on (algorithmic) visualization techniques and Visual Analytics.
  • The Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation of the University of Amsterdam, where Prof. dr. Arianna Betti heads a group working on Digital Humanities and philosophy. This group will involve the world's leading experts working on Digital Humanities.