Models, objects, and ghosts: visualizing history

Abstract

Why is contemporary academic history mainly practiced through writing, while visualization of history is msotly found in museums and in non-academic genres? This essay explores five different methods of visualizing history to provide a starting point for discussions of the value of visualizations. The methods are first historical paintings, either contemporary with the events depicted or created later for the promotion of narratives. Then models are explored, both physical and virtual, followed by the practice of using ghosts to recreate the human actors of the past. The last methods are imagetexts, as introduced to the theorist William J.T. Mitchell and finally objects as a way of representing historical data. As the field of historical visualization as vast and growing, this essay hopes to inspire further discussion on the matter and possible help change to focus on text alone in academic writing.

Keywords:

• Visualization
• models
• ghosts
• paintings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David J. Staley

David J. Staley is an associate professor in the Department of History, where he teaches courses in digital history and historical methods. He holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Design and Educational Studies. He is a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and an honorary faculty fellow at the Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP) at Bay Path University.

Benjamin Asmussen

Benjamin Asmussen is a curator of the Maritime Museum of Denmark and a part-time lecturer at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen. He hold a PhD in Business History from the Copenhagen Business School and research focuses on early modern maritime, business and global history, especially between Scandinavia and Asia.