Nowadays big data can be found everywhere, and the amount of existing data keeps growing. Yet there’s no point in generating these enormous quantities of data if we don’t know how to interpret or understand them. When we don’t have that much data, it’s enough to just put them into a table in Excel and analyse them one by one. However, in many fields of research or work, there is such a huge amount of data that it’s impossible to understand them just by looking. Data visualization tools (or dataviz), allow us to better understand large quantities of data, and to extract tendencies or schemas.

Human beings are actually used to visualizations: we like colours and patterns. When we see graphs with colours, we can very quickly detect the tendencies and also remember them. As this module demonstrates, dataviz gives us superpowers (Willett et al., 2021).

However, dataviz is not just about collecting data and making graphs with them. A bad graph doesn’t help us either understand or analyse anything. Good dataviz, on the other hand, tells a story and informs us, and this is why data visualization has become a field of research in its own right. Increasing numbers of researchers and artists are focusing on data visualization, as can be seen on this page. Data visualization is also playing an increasingly important role in human sciences. The following page contains a list of all the University departments around the world that focus part of their research on data visualization in the context of digital humanities. Here we can also find the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg. In the next section you can find out more about one of the centre’s biggest projects.

Aida Horaniet Ibańez, Suzana Cascao, and Daniel Richter, researchers from C²DH, worked in collaboration with the artist Marion Dengler (and with support from the Doctoral Education in Science Communication (DESCOM) at the University of Luxembourg), to produce the following comic which provides an example of how data visualization can help in an interdisciplinary project involving an engineer and a historian.

Source : Plorations, Scientific Comics, Universität Luxemburg, https://sciencecomics.uni.lu/its-about-time/

Click here to see the comic in other languages.

To find out even more about data visualization, we suggest you consult the Journal of the Data Visualization Society or this list of book recommendations.

LuxTime is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project between the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), to which researcher Aida Horaniet Ibañez belongs, the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).

The main objective of the LuxTIME project is to construct and visualise different data comprising information from three different fields and scientific perspectives, namely ecohydrology, environmental chemometrics and history.

The LuxTime project aims at using industrialisation of the Minett region as a testbed for methodological and epistemological reflections on how to study the impact of environmental changes on the health of the local population in a long-term perspective. By mixing ‘contextual information’ based on archival evidence with ‘scientific evidence’ deriving from chemical, biological, or medical investigations, the project explores new ground in interpreting “big data of the past” in a truly interdisciplinary setting.

The case of Belval will be used to test the analytical potential of a research concept on multiple levels. In the medium term, the ambition is to expand this concept into a national case study. The aim is to construct a real “Luxembourg time travel machine” which contains multiple types of data from many different types of institution.

The project is part of a larger European project titled “Time machine: Big data of the past for the future of Europe”. This project will create artificial intelligence technologies to give some sense to the enormous quantities of information that can be gathered from complex sets of historical data.

For more information about the LuxTime project, please consult the project website or listen to the podcast with the researcher Aida Horaniet Ibañez.

References
Willett, Wesley, Aseniero, Bon Adriel, Carpendale, Sheelagh, Dragicevic, Pierre, Jansen, Yvonne, Oehlberg, Lora & Isenberg, Petra. (2021). Perception ! Immersion ! Empowerment ! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 28(1), 22-32