Palladio – Humanities thinking about data visualization
From the webpage:
Palladio is a web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data. It is a product of the "Networks in History" project that has its roots in another humanities research project based at Stanford: Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRofL). MRofL produced a number of unique visualizations tied to individual case studies and specific research questions. You can see the tools on this site and read about the case studies at republicofletters.stanford.edu.
With "Networks in History" we are taking the insights gained and lessons learned from MRofL and applying them to a set of visualizations that reflect humanistic thinking about data. Palladio is our first step toward opening data visualization to any researcher by making it possible to upload data and visualize within the browser without any barriers. There is no need to create an account and we do not store the data. On the visualization side, we have emphasized tools for filtering. There is a timeline filter that allows for filtering on discontinuous time periods. There is a facet filter based on Moritz Stefaner's Elastic Lists that is particularly useful when exploring multidimensional data sets.
The correspondence networks in the Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRofL) project will be of particular interest to humanists.
Quite challenging on their own but imagine the utility of exploding every letter into different subjects and statements about subjects, which automatically map to other identified subjects and statements about subjects in other correspondence.
Scholars already know about many such relationships in intellectual history but those associations are captured in journals, monographs, identified in various ways and lack in many cases, explicit labeling of roles. To say nothing of having to re-tread the path of an author to discover their recording of such associations in full text form.
If such paths were easy to follow, the next generation of scholars would develop new paths, as opposed to making known ones well-worn.