Representing the Digital Humanities Community: Unveiling The Social Network Visualization of an International Conference

This paper deals with the sense of represent- ing both a new domain as Digital Humanities and its community. Based on a case study, where a set of visualizations was used to represent the community attending the international Digital Humanities conference of 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the meaning of representing a community is investigated in the light of the theories of three acknowledged authors, namely Charles Sanders Peirce for his notion of the interpretant, Ludwig Wittgenstein for his insights on the use of language, and finally Bruno Latour for his ideas of representing politics. There results a proposal to designing and interpreting social network visualizations in a more thoughtful way, while remaining aware of the relation between objects in the real world and their visualizations. As this type of work pertains to a wider scope, we propose bringing a theoretical framework to a young domain such as data visualization.