Visualizations, visualizations everywhere, but what do people see when they look at them?

It’s hard to know what people think they see when they look at visualizations. So I propose a session where we look at a bunch of visualizations, especially but not necessarily from history or the humanities, and talk about what we see. This discussion could include at least three elements. First, perhaps some people in the room will be versed in the science of perception. Second (and more interesting to me, at least) I’d like to see the different scholarly interpretations people make of visualizations. To put the question a different way, if you were going to show a particular visualization to a class or write about it in an article, what arguments would you make? Third, should the conventions (the grammar) of historical and humanities visualizations be different than the visualizations that prevail elsewhere? (Cf. Johanna Drucker’s article.)

If people are interested in this session, perhaps we could prepare for the discussion by posting links to visualizations that we can talk about in the comment section below.

Any #lodlam (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums) folks coming? I’d like to talk and/or show-and-tell about projects that use LOD in some way — especially consuming or using, not just publishing. Ideally, I’d like to look at code and or SPARQL queries being used. Doing actual queries on DBpedia if people are interested would be great, too.

It would all depend on who comes, I guess. So I’m not sure what the ratios of Make/Play/Talk would be. But I’m hoping for a little hands-on LOD results. I have one example I could show to get the ball rolling.