Glass Cast

El propósito de este artículo es presentar Glass Cast, una interfaz para la visualización de redes de conocimiento, la cual podría considerarse como un ejemplo del involucramiento de diseñadores profesionales desde la conceptualización de visualizaciones específicamente para humanidades digitales. La visualización de redes de conocimiento está basada en relaciones explícitas e implícitas entre documentos de una base de datos. Dichas relaciones están determinadas por parámetros tales como autoría, tiempo, tema, disciplina u otras, de acuerdo con el criterio y deseos del investigador. Los datos son adquiridos a partir de reportes creados dentro de Zotero, el conocido administrador de referencias libre. La interfaz funcional completa puede ser descargada desde el repositorio GitHub, aunque está abierta a cambios, adaptaciones y mejoras tanto por el equipo original de desarrollo como por cualquier otra parte interesada. Palabras clave: visualización, humanidades digitales, interfaces, diseño de la información, redes de conocimiento, movilización del conocimiento. Abstract The purpose of this article is to introduce Glass Cast, an interface for the visualization of knowledge networks, which could be deemed as an example of the involvement of professional designers from the stage of conceptualization of visualizations, specifically intended for digital humanities. The visualization of knowledge networks is based on explicit and implicit relationships between documents in a database. These relationships are determined on parameters such as authorship, time, topic, discipline or others that would depend on the researcher´s criterion. The data is acquired from reports created from Zotero, the well-known open citation manager. The full working interface can be downloaded from GitHub although it is open to changes, adaptations and improvements either from the original development team or from any other interested party.

A demo of the Glass Cast

This article reflects on the importance of user feedback in early stages of the design process of Glass Cast. A 3-D interface, Glass Cast is intended for the visualization of knowledge networks, including parameters such as authorship, time, subject, discipline, and connections between documents in a corpus. The name Glass Cast refers to the working metaphor of the prototype, which is a cast sculpture in which the object of representation appears as negative space in a glass block. The participants in this study, graduate students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences, provided feedback on a low-fidelity paper prototype in the context of interviews. Their feedback is organized following the taxonomy of user-interface metaphors.

Visualizing Texts Through Experimental Interfaces: Plot Vis And Glass Cast

Tracking the origin and mobilization of concepts across time and through different disciplinary fields is a key challenge in humanities and social sciences scholarship. For example, in this project a topic of interest has been the origin and mobilization of the phrase “visual literacy,” a trans-disciplinary concept that has garnered increasing attention in the wake of what Bolter (1991; 2001) has described as “the breakout of the visual” (p. 47 ff). Numerous scholars from different fields have advanced our understanding of “visual literacy” through the past 75 years, at times adopting different terminology to describe what is clearly a similar notion related to how humans make meaning of visual representations: visual grammar, visual rhetoric, visual literacy. In approaching the challenging task of mapping the knowledge networks that inform our understanding of this topic, it became clear that a graphical representation of relationships and patterns that could be displayed in terms of chronology, discipline or episteme, would be valuable, and thus the “Glass Cast Prototype” was conceptualized. In this paper we briefly discuss our tracing of the usage of “visual literacy” and related notions through time and across different knowledge domains, and then discuss our efforts to visualize the complex networks that emerged through the conceptualization of the Glass Cast Prototype.

This paper addressed the metaphorical entailments of the Glass Cast prototype, a visualization interface designed to track the mobilization of particular concepts along time and across disciplines. The use of metaphors as resources to convey meaning has been generally established (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Turbayne, 1991), and metaphor’s relevance as an heuristic for interface design conditionally proven (e.g. Barr, P., Biddle, R., & Noble, J., 2002), most noticeably after the launch of the first Graphical User Interfaces. Moreover, scholars such as Barr et. al. (2002) have theorized the role of metaphor in the conveyance of meaning in user interfaces, within which metaphors may inform everything from navigation to the visual representation of processes. Despite ongoing theorization of the affordances of metaphor as a conveyor of meaning and functionality, in interface design, the persuasive element of metaphor tends to be overlooked. The persuasiveness of metaphor has instead been engaged largely in the fields of graphic design for communicative and marketing purposes (Ehses, H., & Lupton, E., 1988). In the realms of graphic design, visualizations have been used as a genre for conveying the reliability of scientific and numeric information, to a point where it is relatively common to find visual references to representations of abstract information, such as maps or graphs. This suggests that the metaphors that structure visualizations often reinforce their persuasive appeal. In this paper, we present an analysis of the functional metaphorical entailments of the Glass Cast interface, taking into consideration its persuasive appeal as well. Specifically, the paper will explore the extent to which the metaphor of the “Glass Cast” engages users, making them more susceptible to conceptual information structured and mapped in this way.