OUTLINE PROPOSALS - FIRST DRAFTS

Visualization of Historical Landscapes

Our goal is to move beyond reliance on text and numbers for understanding a time and place. These visualizations would fuse many kinds of human experiences -- look and feel, density, change over time, grows out of convergence of other interests. To date, big history technology projects have focused on detailed literal recreations of the past, these visualizations would be very different. Instead of the literal, we are looking for tools to abstract and generalize about the human experience in a particular time and place and present that visually.

We would look for a test bed project to develop such a visualization tool. We discussed a range of possibilities including the Atlantic seaboard at the time of the revolution, the Lewis and Clark journeys, etc. Our primary goal is to develop the visualization process that embodies in the templates and tools so that experience is reusable. It is essential that such tools allow the user to move back and forth from the original data, and add to and modify that data. Such movement would allow for modeling of the historical environment and alternative visualizations if different assumptions are used.

The project involves both CS research in visualization tools and extensive humanities research.

Historians specialize in extracting information from documents. The basic humanities research here would involve identifying the best sources for such visualization and modeling how they can be visualized.

We already have a lot of data that has been geo-referenced. This project would be designed to take advantage of other projects, learn how to work from them to produce landscapes. There is good reason to work with a US-focused project, as more fair use material is available. We would want to involve non-Americanist in planning so design can be used for non-US projects in the future.

Most of the field committee would like to stay involve in developing this project.

Forum for Advancing Historical Scholarship

We want to create a forum to encourage historical scholarship makes essential use of the new technology to advance the narrative/analysis. The History Cooperative might be the ideal place to locate such a project.

The project would involve:

Bringing editors together to talk about what new scholarship could look like

Commissioning exemplary works and holding competition for new scholarship

Developing standards for evaluating such work

Building unified website that assembles:

Best practices info and exemplary works

Open-source tools: imaging, scanning, statistical analysis, for interactive discussions