Uncertainty, Narrativity, and Critical Approaches in Digital Humanities Information Visualisation Projects

Information visualisation practices in the Digital Humanities fueled a long-lasting discussion over challenges posed by the interpretative nature of humanistic knowledge. Numerous contributions discuss narrative solutions and methods of uncertainty representation, promoting critical adaptations of general-use visualisations to address the specificities of the humanistic research material. However, existing surveys provide scarce empirical evidence for such advanced approaches, while addressing minor aspects that do not shed light on overall criticalities or the effective contribution of Digital Humanities methodologies to humanities scholarship. This study extends the scope of previous works and addresses how Digital Humanities web-based interfaces support epistemological approaches. 186 projects are classified by domain, narrativity, visualisation types, critical approaches to design solutions, and methods for visualising uncertainty and interpretation. Results reveal a persistent scarcity of narratives and uncertainty representation methods, as well as the incapacity to integrate results into humanistic interpretive frameworks.