I took inspiration from Matteo Bonera’s speech regarding Data Visualization as a way to access Da Vinci’s work “Codice Atlantico” (website here), to examine how Data Visualization is widely used nowadays and how it can be used in non-mathematic fields.
In the age of digitisation, data has become copious and cheap; but the big companies that have a lot of data are the new economical giants. Why is that? Data, if managed, become information, and information is richness since knowing that, future can change.
Moreover, Data Visualization is now a necessity, given the fact that is humanly impossible to compute all the data available without having a way to visualize and understand it.
Infographic, “graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly” [Wikipedia], help us in understanding better the reality around us, but can also be a danger if it ends up in a misleading graph.
Infographic became relevant also in an artistic way: the more beautiful a graph is, the more it is attractive; which turns into an important feature when considering that the more attractive a thing is, the more people will look at it, and therefore, the more it will communicate.
How can we adapt infographics to represent linguistic data? Distant reading is helping us in managing big quantities of text that would be impossible to read in short time. Once we have the essence of our texts, we can use it to show the big picture in an handy way. By implication, there is no limit in using these tecnhologies in humanities; but rather, the use of these could give back the appeal that fields as literature, arts or history are losing.
We need to take advantage of what technological progress gives us, especially in a world governed by statistics and data, to avoid humanities from going under but instead to find new ways to study them and to give them new appeal.
The paper was written for the course “Seminario di Cultura Digitale” in my Digital Humanities Master at University of Pisa.
View paper ITALIAN: pdf