How Historians Use Visualization: A Corpus-Backed Taxonomy and Analysis for Cross-Disciplinary Practice

2026-05-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic research on how historians actually employ visualization as data-driven evidence—a gap that hinders the design of interdisciplinary visualization tools. Through a mixed-methods approach, the authors construct a corpus of 14,021 images, apply semi-automated annotation to 4,831 visualization instances, and integrate expert interviews with boundary object analysis using HiFigAtlas. Drawing on a large-scale dataset of 4,142 historical journal articles, they propose the first hierarchical taxonomy of visualizations in historical scholarship. This taxonomy identifies five distinct roles of visualizations and reveals their usage patterns across subfields and temporal dimensions, along with associated cognitive and practical barriers. The findings provide both an empirical foundation and a theoretical framework for developing visualization tools better aligned with historians’ disciplinary needs.

Abstract

Visualization in historical research is shifting from isolated attempts to systematic practices. However, data-driven evidence about how historians actually use visualization remains scarce. We present a corpus-driven, mixed-methods study that combines analysis of images from 4,142 research articles across history and digital humanities journals with a collaboratively developed visualization taxonomy and a semi-automatic labeling pipeline. We construct a corpus of 14,021 images, classify 4,831 visualization instances using a hierarchical, domain-informed taxonomy, and analyze patterns of visualization adoption across venues, history subfields, and time. To interpret these patterns, we conduct interviews with 11 historians and use HiFigAtlas system as a boundary object to support joint inspection of the corpus. We identify distinct roles for visualizations in historical research: primary-source, evidence-synthesis, communicative, confirmative, and exploratory. We further find that while historians pursue diverse goals with figures, persistent epistemological and practical barriers, such as uncertainty, provenance, justification burden, and publication constraints, impede the adoption of visualization. This work contributes a grounded account of visualization use in historical scholarship and points to opportunities to better support domain-specific needs.

Problem

• visualization
• historical research
• corpus analysis
• epistemological barriers
• publication constraints

Innovation

• corpus-driven analysis
• visualization taxonomy
• mixed-methods study
• boundary object
• domain-specific visualization