Temporal Modelling:

Visualizing Temporal Relations for Humanities Scholarship

Part Two: Composition Tool Design

Bethany Nowviskie 
 

Temporal Modelling, a University of Virginia/SpecLab project now entering its third year of Intel sponsorship, is working to create a “time machine” for humanities computing.  Not only does this interactive toolset take time and the temporal relations inherent in humanities data as its computational and aesthetic domain, enabling the production and manipulation of elaborate, subjectively-inflected timelines, but it also allows its users to intervene in and alter the conventional interpretive sequence of visual thinking in digital humanities.  The first article in this series (Part One: Literature Review and Conceptualization), co-authored with project director Johanna Drucker, presented an overview of traditional ways of thinking about and visualizing time.  Extensive research on time and temporality informed our design process.  This article will place that process and the resulting composition and display tools in a humanities computing context, describing the project’s practical and rhetorical goals and examining some special visual features for encoding and manipulating subjectivity in temporal relations. 
 

The Temporal Modelling environment enables a shift in some entrenched procedures and assumptions about visualization in the growing discipline of humanities