ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF DATA VISUALIZATION IN HISTORY: SOME RESEARCH NOTES

Abstract

The paper presents some theoretical and methodological inquiries about the ways in which historians produced historical scholarship, emphasizing the use of interactive graphs, dynamic maps and animations. If the object of historical research has different flows and diverse intensities, why would be the written paper the main (if not the only) mean of publishing historical knowledge? Historians have chosen, since the nineteenth century, to narrate through writing the social dynamics of the past, barely exploring alternatives ways of representation. Recently, new digital platforms have been inspiring historians and social scientists interested in the historical time to produce some groundbreaking experiments. These experiments, thus, are the object of this paper.

Keywords:
Data visualization; databases; graphs and diagrams