Provenance Visualization as an Entry Point to the History and Curation of Information Collections

Provenance—the origin and production methods of an artifact or piece of information—is an essential part across allfields of knowledge production. Its disclosure ensures authenticity, reproducibility, and transparency. While digital tools can automate provenance tracking and disclosure, the amount and complexity of provenance information presents a challenge, particularly within the context of cultural collections, where physically-born artifacts are transformed into digital space. This process introduces a number of methodological and curatorial decisions that, in turn, can have a grave influence on how the—once physical—collection is represented and how it will be interpreted. In previous work, we have started to address this issue by introducing provenance-driven visualization as an approach to provenance disclosure that (1) traces and categorizes both the physical and digital provenance of information collections (e.g., transcriptions, modifications of content and structure, ex/inclusion of information items) and (2) utilizes visualization to disclose and make provenance explorable in interactive ways. While this approach has shown potential, there are challenges to designing provenance-driven visualizations which can be perceived as complex and abstract and, ultimately, a distraction from the information collections’ content. How can visualization design navigate tensions between making visible provenance information and underlying curatorial decisions in a holistic and compact way, while enabling easy entry points to and promoting the critical interpretation of the collection’s content? In this paper, we present a novel design approach to provenance-driven visualization that combines abstract visualization, textual descriptions, and representations of artifactual form with storytelling techniques to introduce provenance information. Our findings from a qualitative study demonstrate the success of this approach in (1) providing a visual entry point into the collection’s provenance, (2) promoting an in-depth understanding of the transitions and underlying curatorial decisions thecollection has gone through, all the while (3) positively influencing the collections’ content exploration and its critical interpretation. Our work contributes new perspectives on how visualization can be applied to add transparency and to raise awareness of the constructed and situated nature of data, in particular, in the context of cultural collections, but also beyond.