Projects

Abstract: Visualization has long been recognized as an essential component of scientific research for knowledge discovery and communication. In his classic essay titled “Drawing Things Together,” Latour (1990) argued that visual inscriptions are the “immutable mobiles” in sciences, which capture the fundamental scientific discovery and information within their standardized, optically consistent structures, while at the same time, mobilize the construction and diffusion of scientific consensus with their ability to move across various contexts, especially from the laboratories to scientific publications. Empirical results from research in science and technology studies (STS) have confirmed this epistemic role of visualization and demonstrated the value of visualization as a critical indicator for the disciplinarity of scientific fields. In contrast to scientific disciplines, the values and functions of visualization in the humanities have yet to be examined empirically, despite the increasing application of visual technologies in humanities research. My dissertation offers the first thorough empirical examination of visualizations in digital humanities (DH) research using large-scale DH journal publication data and semi-structured interviews with DH practitioners, illustrating visualization's rhetorical roles in humanities knowledge communication and its impacts on the evolving dynamics of DH scholarship. 

Overview: The idea that active debate and criticism generates knowledge dates back to at least Socrates, with the Socratic method of mediated critical questioning and answering serving as a pedagogical model for legal training, judicial systems, and scientific communities across the world. Further, the ability of social groups to discover and share knowledge and novel insights that are greater than the sum of their individual experiences is the foundation of the marketplace of ideas, democracy, progress from Milton through to Mill, Madison, and Merton. Yet, on social media platforms critical questioning and challenging others appear to exacerbate today’s social polarization across many contexts. As a greater proportion of human communication and interpersonal connections move online, we are faced with the crucial challenge of identifying, instead of assuming, the conditions whereby active debate facilitates and accelerates new collective understanding. And what are the institutional rules and arrangements that make this possible?  With the research opportunities provided by the availability of large-scale online datasets and computational methods, this project test the assumption that criticism spurs novel concept formation, a prerequisite for new insights, and analyzes the conditions under which criticism generates novel knowledge.