temporalmodellingsummaryofresearchandprojectoutl.docVIP

Temporal Modelling: Summary of Research and Project Outline Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie October 2001, Intel Presentation Abstract: The practical goal of this project is to create a visual scheme and interactive tool set for the representation of temporal relations in humanities-based or qualitative research, with particular emphasis on the subjective experience of temporality. Our rhetorical goal is to bring visualization and interface design into the early content modeling phase of humanities computing projects, with an eye toward both enriching the design aspects of established scholarly endeavors and making humanities computing attractive and comprehensible to students and faculty without specialized technical skills. Providing a foundation for the project involved several aspects: Drawing on research across a range of disciplines, we focused on: classifying existing concepts of time and temporality, elaborating a stable nomenclature culled from the existing literature, and establishing the requirements for a graphical system for the visualization of temporal relations. Our approach emphasizes the need to create a structural and notational scheme that accommodates subjective perceptions and experiences of time as well as multiple, even contradictory, temporalities within the document-dependent domains of humanities and social sciences research. The goal of our first phase of research was to lay out these conceptual and representational issues in such a way that they could expand our understanding of time and temporal relations beyond the usual linear, time-line approach. The application of this research to the development of a demonstration gave rise to a distinction between approaches to visualization, fundamentally different in aim and functionality, though capable of sharing the same visualization schemes. These two approaches we named the “composition” or “play” space and the “display” space. Our conviction was that the capab