Valuable Research for Visualization and Digital Humanities: A Balancing Act

The value of a visualization evolved in a digital humanities project is per se not evenly high for both involved research fields. When an approach is too complex – which counts as a strong argument for a publication in a visualization realm – it might get invaluable for humanities scholars due to problems of comprehension. On the other hand, if a clean, easily comprehensible visualization is valuable for a humanities scholar, the missing novelty most likely impedes a computer science publication. My own digital humanities background has shown that it is indeed a balancing act to generate beneficial research results for both the visualization and the digital humanities fields. To find out how visualizations are used as means to communicate humanities matters and to assess the impact of the visualization community to the digital humanities field, I surveyed the long papers of the last four annual digital humanities conferences, discovering that visualization scholars are rarely involved in collaborations that produce valuable digital humanities results, in other words, it seems hard to walk the tightrope of generating valuable research for both fields. Derived from my own digital humanities experiences, I suggest a methodology how to design a digital humanities project to overcome this issue.