Transparency to Visibility (T2V): Network Visualization in Humanities Research

FAIN: HAA-261070-18

University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)
Samuel Scott Graham (Project Director: January 2018 to June 2021)

The development of a set of tools to automatically extract and visualize relationships in large textual corpora, with a focus on making “hidden” relationships more visible.

Humanities researchers have long studied how power and influence circulate through cultural systems. Advances in network visualization tools support this work, allowing scholars to create graphical representations of complex systems. However, extracting and preparing relational data for visualization can present significant technological challenges when working with the kinds of textual artifacts commonly studied by humanists. This project will develop and test an innovative approach for efficiently curating and visualizing relationships in ways that align with humanities research. Using sample texts from medical research, a digital and medical humanities team will develop, test, and enhance a new toolkit for automatically extracting and visualizing relationships in large textual corpora. The project team will create both a graphical user interface for the toolkit and an open-source code repository to support use by digital humanities scholars.