ABSTRACT
The use of computer-based technologies within the arts and humanities, including those used for visualization, appear to have become, along with taxes and death, a fact of life. This chapter is primarily concerned with one aspect of this process – visualization. Visualization is a particularly interesting process. As a technical operation visualization carries the implication of being, in most senses, final act within a larger process that has involved the collection, selection and manipulation of data in some manner. The role of visualization, or imagination, is therefore increasing as a methodological tool of consequence. However, whilst flexibility and imagination are desirable qualities in general, intellectual and technological landscape relating to visualization looks to have more in common with the Wild West rather than the Arcadian backdrop often more suitable for a considered national research strategy. Having emerged over millennia, the landscape is a four-dimensional puzzle in which spatial relations of monuments must be merged with archaeological time and personal time.
