ABSTRACT
The mass digitization of archival sources transcends borders, media, and time within an active growing global digital entity. This 4D digital space gives images, in particular, associative meaning that opens a previously unseen window on the past. Yet, the vocabulary of digital images often eludes scholars who bring traditional methodologies to interactive platforms that, like all media forms, have distinct ground rules. Visuality as a principle and behaviour can guide the use of images in digital scholarship through both research and publishing by moving scholars towards visual art and design. Cross-disciplinary actions like building an image-rich website reflect back on research where the immersion in dynamic image fields—looking close, from afar, in parallel, sorting and resorting—can undermine intellectual preconceptions. Knowledge of the past becomes experiential, like a watercolour painted by the historian, while text adds context and argument from a less dominant position. Choreographing visual experiences becomes the author’s task.
This paper defines visuality as a scholarly model critical to making image-driven scholarship a digital and post-digital paradigm. Drawing on the work of the Visualizing Cultures project at MIT—founded in 2002 and currently comprised of 55 content units by 28 contributing historians, curators, and art historians—the paper poses attributes of visual narrative that blur the boundaries between author and audience as co-creators of historical narratives that move in multiple directions across time and space.
