Stefania Forlini

Speculative Practices: Utilizing InfoVis to Explore Untapped Literary Collections

In this paper we exemplify how information visualization supports speculative thinking, hypotheses testing, and preliminary interpretation processes as part of literary research. While InfoVis has become a buzz topic in the digital humanities, skepticism remains about how effectively it integrates into and expands on traditional humanities research approaches. From an InfoVis perspective, we lack case studies that show the specific design challenges that make literary studies and humanities research at large a unique application area for information visualization. We examine these questions through our case study of the Speculative W@nderverse, a visualization tool that was designed to enable the analysis and exploration of an untapped literary collection consisting of thousands of science fiction short stories. We present the results of two empirical studies that involved general-interest readers and literary scholars who used the evolving visualization prototype as part of their research for over a year. Our findings suggest a design space for visualizing literary collections that is defined by (1) their academic and public relevance, (2) the tension between qualitative vs. quantitative methods of interpretation, (3) result-vs. process-driven approaches to InfoVis, and (4) the unique material and visual qualities of cultural collections. Through the Speculative W@nderverse we demonstrate how visualization can bridge these sometimes contradictory perspectives by cultivating curiosity and providing entry points into literary collections while, at the same time, supporting multiple aspects of humanities research processes.

The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice

The Fin-de-Siecle Moon, a 76 centimetre musical automaton made by the famous French toy maker Gustave Vichy c.1890 (Fig. 10.1),3 highlights a peculiar intersection of late-Victorian scientific materialism and the kind of Decadent materialism signalled by — but not limited to — the fascination with and collection of a variety of material things.4 Powered by its clockwork mechanism, this finely dressed dandy moon swings its walking stick, moves its head from side to side, and exhales smoke from its cigarette, showcasing both the mechanical nature of human movement and the Decadent art of the pose. It displays, in other words, a variety of scripts — physiological and social — that underlie both everyday and theatrical performances.5 If an observer writing for La Nature in 1891 suggests that the dandy moon has a ‘natural air’ about him and that his movements are akin to those of any ‘ordinary mortal’, he does not simply exaggerate the automaton’s life-like qualities;6 he simultaneously echoes contemporary scientific understandings of human behaviour and the Decadent understanding of the ‘natural’ as artificial performance.