Visualizing the Past: Tools and Techniques for Understanding Historical Processes

FAIN: HD-50442-08

University of Richmond (Richmond, VA 23173-0001)
Andrew J. Torget (Project Director: April 2008 to January 2010)

A two-day workshop on issues relating to visualization and historical processes and the first steps toward the creation of new tools for overcoming obstacles to data visualization work.

The University of Richmond requests a Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to bring together experts for investigations about how to overcome limitations that prevent most humanities scholars from taking advantage of visualization techniques in their research. The grant will fund a two-day workshop where invited scholars will discuss current work on visualizing historical processes, and together consider: (1) How can we harness emerging cyber-infrastructure tools and interoperability standards to explore, visualize, and analyze spatial and temporal components of distributed digital archives to better understand historical events and processes? (2) How can user-friendly tools or web sites be created to allow scholars and researchers to animate spatial and temporal data housed on different systems across the Internet? The grant will also fund initial experiments toward creating new tools for overcoming obstacles to data visualization work. Results will be presented as a white paper.