ABSTRACT
The practice and theorising of museum spaces is a rich subject for both analytic and synthesising interdisciplinary research. One way of dealing with the provision of multiple perspectives on large combined quantitative, qualitative and descriptive data sets is through computational visualisation. Conducting highly interdisciplinary research, such as that undertaken in the MeLa project, brings into perspective the contours and boundaries of one's own field of expertise, and what types of artefacts need to be created to help bridge these boundaries. In latent semantic visualisation, an approach is taken in which text is dealt with as an object-of-analysis, from which algorithms extract overall topics and themes, automatically from 'bags of words', using various connectivity. Using sorting and semantic algorithms to automate the reading of data, it is possible to 'focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes or genres and systems'.
