Understanding the Narrative Functions of Visualization in Digital Humanities Publications: A Case Study of the Journal of Cultural Analytics.

The use and effects of visual representations in knowledge production have been a charged topic in scientific research. In the field of humanities studies, however, this topic remains under-examined despite the increasing applications of data visualization in the field. This paper aims to understand how visual representations facilitate narrative construction in published articles in the emerging field of digital humanities (DH). Through the methods of content analysis and close reading, we analyzed the narrative functions of visualizations in the argumentation process with a selected sample of research articles published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics from 2017 to 2019. With four observations from the analysis, this study presented a preliminary yet innovative examination of DH’s visual language and proposed suggestions on integrating existing functional frameworks of data visualization with the research contexts of digital humanities.