Rongqian Ma , assistant professor of information and library science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, has received an IAS Collaboration Research Award for her proposed project on visualization in digital humanities.
The award provides funding to help faculty prepare publications, performances, exhibits, symposia and grant proposals that utilize the expertise of faculty from IU or other institutions. Awards were evaluated on the research project’s clarity and compelling nature, and its capacity to further research and creative activity, as well as its overall importance. The maximum amount is $15,000 over a two-year period.
Elizabeth Kang, coordinator at the IU Institute for Advanced Study, said the competition was strong with many excellent proposals.
Ma is collaborating with Ming Jiang, assistant professor of data science at IUPUI’s Luddy School, and Kai Li, University of Tennessee professor of information science.
“I was very happy to hear that Rongqian received the IAS collaboration award,” said Noriko Hara, professor of information science and chair of information and library science. “Rongqian’s research uses visualization to understand the landscape of digital humanity scholarships. I am excited to hear the results coming out of this collaborative work.”
Their research will center on how visual representations function in conjunction with textural narratives. Data visualization uses tools such as interactive maps, charts, graphs and videos to visualize and communicate research outcomes. Visuals are embedded into text to aid in the discovery of larger patterns that might not be identified through text alone.
Recent advances in information technologies have allowed scholars to increasingly use visualizations in digital humanities. Ma and her group seek to investigate the effect of this on communicating results to wider research communities. They want to expand existing data infrastructures to explore the roles of visuals in digital humanities knowledge production and communication.
Ma said the award money will help them start the project.
“We are going to build an open dataset that describes the visual languages of the digital humanities research. We hope the dataset will facilitate reuse and further research.”