Te groot voor het blote oog. Over interactieve visualisatie in de studie van correspondenties

Samenvatting

The article argues for the importance of techniques for the visualisation and contextualisation of quantitative phenomena in collections of letters. Visualisation techniques support the 'distant reading' that Moretti has argued for in Graphs, Maps and Trees, which becomes increasingly important in an age of massive collections of digitised material. It is argued good that good visualisations should be interactive, should provide access into the data they visualise, and should be addressable. Examples based on the correspondence of Hugo Grotius show how diagrams, maps and timelines can provide helpful context for studying the letters.