:MeetPi

I’ve just finished a week of conferences on electronic visaulisation ans the arts and digital humanities.  It’s been a long week, but it has been a rewarding one.  There’s a vast amount of work going on, and most of it is clever and valuable.

There were some major themes that emerged from various discussions that went on this week.  One of them was that a great deal of computational work in the humanities seems to be focussed on textual analysis and algorithms and applications of this.  Visualisation is often coupled to this anaysis – the use of charts and graphs to show the sum total of various statistical variations in the text.  While this work is great, it’s not the only way that data visualisation can be applied to humanities work, as we have shown with the Flickr Commons Explorer and as Mitchell has shown with the Archives Explorer.

Another thing that is only just beginning to be addressed is the importance of the interface. So much cultural information is compiled into databases and then hidden behind web-based interfaces that often limit or at least present the information in a particular way that’s not necessarily conducive to certain kinds of uses.  For example, the search interface reigns supreme, and often this can have the effect of hiding data rather than revealing it.

Museums continue to be very interested in ways of reaching out an engaging with their audiences, but I think many of them underestimate how good some of the work in this area has been.  In my estimation museums and other cultural institutions are among some of the most innovative users of mobile media and social networking – way ahead of government, education and most businesses.

Another big thing that came across for me was the importance of remembering that while Australia has so far pretty much escaped the economic catastrophe that is befalling the US and Europe, over in England the mood is quite different.  Here the talk is of cuts – 25% cuts to the cultural sector, threats to the viability of humanities disciplines, and even entire universities.  On one hand this might mean we can pick up some good scholars from overseas, but on the other hand it is a sobering reminder that economic chaos is generally a bad thing for the cultural sector.

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