As digital humanists have adopted visualization tools in their work, they have borrowed methods developed for the graphical display of information in the natural and social sciences. These tools carry with them assumptions of knowledge as observer-independent and certain, rather than observer co-dependent and interpretative. This paper argues that we need a humanities approach to the graphical expression of interpretation. To begin, the concept of data as a given has to be rethought through a humanistic lens and characterized as capta, taken and constructed. Next, the forms for graphical expression of capta need to be more nuanced to show ambiguity and complexity. Finally, the use of a humanistic approach, rooted in a co-dependent relation between observer and experience, needs to be expressed according to graphics built from interpretative models. In summary: all data have to be understood as capta and the conventions created to express observer-independent models of knowledge need to be radically reworked to express humanistic interpretation.
Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
by Johanna Drucker
digital humanities quarterly
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html
Capta and Data: Visualization, the Humanistic Method, and Representing Knowledge
by anderson
http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/f2011dh/2011/10/31/capta-and-data-visualization-the-humanistic-method-and-representing-knowledge/
In her article “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Johanna Drucker discusses the importance of representing data produced by humanists as nuanced, constructed, and situated, while also recognizing the performative nature of interpretation. Since visualization tools are traditionally used by the natural and social sciences, they carry with them the somewhat erroneous assumption that such data being represented is produced empirically and independently of the observer – i.e. that the data is an accurate representation of reality. This assumes that the observation of a certain phenomena is the same as the phenomena itself. Drucker thus makes a distinction between “capta” and “data,” arguing that the former is a much more accurate word to describe the production and representation of knowledge in the humanities, and elsewhere. The word “data” comes from Latin to mean “given,” whereas the word “capta” is derived from the Latin word for “taken.” Thus, she writes, “Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed.” The idea of “capta” then better represents the humanistic method of knowledge production as situated, partial, and constituitive. She notes that this does not mean that the use of “data” in the sciences and “capta” in the humanities juxtaposes the two disciplines in an intellectual opposition, but rather that humanists are perhaps more aware of the fact that “intellectual disciplines create the objects of their inquiry.”
How then, do we represent capta and account for the interpretative nature of knowledge, or display it in a qualitative manner? If you wanted to study represent the percentages of immigrant men and women in various nations at a given time, this information might be displayed in a bar chart. Such information, however, is portrayed as deceptively simple and fixed. A bar chart does not account for what constitutes as a permeable “nation,” the transient nature of immigrant populations, while also assuming a simplistic, binary distinction between genders. Another visualization is needed in order to display gender ambiguity, different naturalization rules, shifting borders of nations, among other conditional expressions of interpretation.
To overturn the assumptions that structure conventions acquired from other domains requires that we re-examine the intellectual foundations of digital humanities, putting techniques of graphical display on a foundation that is humanistic at its base. This requires first and foremost that we reconceive all data as capta. Differences in the etymological roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.
My distinction between data and capta is not a covert suggestion that the humanities and sciences are locked into intellectual opposition, or that only the humanists have the insight that intellectual disciplines create the objects of their inquiry. Any self-conscious historian of science or clinical researcher in the natural or social sciences insists the same is true for their work. Statisticians are extremely savvy about their artifices. Social scientists may divide between realist and constructivist foundations for their research, but none are naïve when it comes to the rhetorical character of statistics. The history of knowledge is the history of forms of expression of knowledge, and those forms change. What can be said, expressed, represented in any era is distinct from that of any other, with all the attendant caveats and reservations that attend to the study of the sequence of human intellectual events, keeping us from any assertion of progress while noting the facts of change and transformation. The historical, critical study of science is as full of discussions of this material as the humanities.