Anna Foka-- "Digital Pasts 2017: a Status Quo on Visualizing History"

Visualizations have become an innovative medium for historical inquiry, particularly for historians who are interested in the interplay of ideology and power. It has been argued by (Turkel 2011: 287) that “digitization creates a representation that shares some of the attributes of an original and that even technologies that are not frequently used by historians may enable the capture and recreation of documents, artefacts, and environments.” Taking into consideration that historians are today more frequently encouraged to think in terms of digital transduction of historical materials, this presentation focuses on current trends in visualizing history. More precisely, Dr. Foka will focus on the visualization of the past as 1) interactive mapping applications and 2) immersive, virtual reality environments. For the purpose of this talk she will discuss projects that are recently, digitally implemented at Umeå University. She will analyze their role as knowledge production processes as well as artefacts for outreach engagement. She will show how both our historical knowledge is fragmented and how digital technology may equally appear ‘broken’ in reassembling data and communicating the past.  Ultimately, Dr. Foka argues that on many accounts, historical studies qua digital is still conceptual and experimental, but it is, nevertheless a worthy enterprise.

Anna Foka is associate professor  in Information Technology and the Humanities at HUMlab, Umeå University, in Sweden, and has a background in social and cultural history and classical philology. She has published in the fields of gender and humour, history and popular culture, historical game studies, and digital history. She is currently exploring digital research infrastructures (interfaces, virtual reality, multisensory environments) and their contribution to historical knowledge production. 

Talk sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University.