Visualization-based Storytelling: for Digital Humanities

In the domains of digital humanities and cultural heritage, storytelling has emerged as a crucial methodology for conveying the depth and breadth of our shared history. This dissertation thesis explores the intersection of visualization and narrative techniques to embrace and present the complex matters of humanities and culture in an engaging manner. The focus lies on developing and applying storytelling strategies using visualizations to enhance the understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage in a comprehensive and systematic approach to support the iterative work with a multitude of databases, media, visualizations, and user practices in adjacent scientific and practical fields.

Exploring the intersection of digital humanities, cultural heritage, and visualization sets the stage for this thesis, wherein current tasks, shared goals, methodologies, and challenges in digitization, depiction, accessibility, management, documentation, preservation, and communication are examined.

As a means of addressing these issues, the current state of research in visualization-based storytelling is assessed by proposing a problem-specific design space for analyzing and creating appropriate communication of complex topics with humanities and cultural relevance.

An applied example of such complex matters is musicology, which deals among others with pieces of music and musical instruments. These two tangible threads of cultural heritage are interwoven with intangible traditions and now need to be visually combined and communicated. However, no explicit storytelling methods are used here yet, but rather contextualization and knowledge derivation by means of explorative visualizations and hypotheses. Thereby applicationoriented collaboration with domain experts, who are involved in the development and interpretation of corresponding results, leads to untold observations of music composition and instrument making. Immersing on these stories, further aspects of musicology are explored by delving into natural materials from plants and animals in endangered ecosystems to manufacture musical instruments. These complex and fragile inter-dependencies are broad into context and visualized for experts from ecology, geography and instrument making. In contrast, to communicate these complex relationships to a broader public, the various visualizations and corresponding visual elements were reused and embedded in an interactive scrollytelling. Enriched with further multimedia elements, they tell a comprehensive story of musical instruments and their remotely linked ecosystems around the globe. In contrast to that, in a further project, people, objects, places, and communities from different nations are connected by their stories while using visualizationbased storytelling to present and convey them. The resulting holistic platform unites curation, visual analysis, and communication through storytelling. To demonstrate the excellence of this approach, a variety of domain-motivated case studies explain the methodologies with different media, types of visualization, databases, and practices in an illustrative manner. Ultimately, a comprehensive discussion of experiences and research findings, as well as ongoing questions and challenges are presented. This highlights the importance of a user-centered design approach in developing visual analytics tools that are accessible and engaging to a wide range of users to enhance our understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage. This contributes to the fields by offering new insights into using visualization-based storytelling to analyze and communicate the complexities of digital humanities and cultural data.