Visualization Praxis: Data Visualizations with an Interdisciplinary Advantage

Abstract

Digital scholarship is changing the way we communicate, access, connect, learn, and create information. Increasingly, scholars, archivists, journalists, authors, scientists, humanists, and others want to include specific technologies such as data visualizations and interactive models to communicate their work. This is being done through class assignments, project websites, code on Github, newsfeeds, social media, and other digital channels, using visualization tools such as Google Fusion Tables, StoryMaps, Viewshare, Tableau Public, and D3, among others. These technologies have changed what we can do with data. Among scholars, they are catalyzing discussions on the importance of hyperlinking and interoperability and what it means for data to be linkable, mined, curated, analyzed, visualized and so forth. Just a few years ago, we could not absorb and disseminate knowledge and information in the ways we now can. Therefore, in the digital age of the 21st century, many higher education institutions are considering how to better support scholarship in a wide variety of disciplines on their campuses. One response is implementing digital tools into the curriculum and community archives.