Evaluating a Taxonomy of Textual Uncertainty for Collaborative Visualisation in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

The capture, modelling and visualisation of uncertainty has become a hot topic in many areas of science, such as the digital humanities (DH). Fuelled by critical voices among the DH community, DH scholars are becoming more aware of the intrinsic advantages that incorporating the notion of uncertainty into their workflows may bring. Additionally, the increasing availability of ubiquitous, web-based technologies has given rise to many collaborative tools that aim to support DH scholars in performing remote work alongside distant peers from other parts of the world. In this context, this paper describes two user studies seeking to evaluate a taxonomy of textual uncertainty aimed at enabling remote collaborations on digital humanities (DH) research objects in a digital medium. Our study focuses on the task of free annotation of uncertainty in texts in two different scenarios, seeking to establish the requirements of the underlying data and uncertainty models that would be needed to implement a hypothetical collaborative annotation system (CAS) that uses information visualisation and visual analytics techniques to leverage the cognitive effort implied by these tasks. To identify user needs and other requirements, we held two user-driven design experiences with DH experts and lay users, focusing on the annotation of uncertainty in historical recipes and literary texts. The lessons learned from these experiments are gathered in a series of insights and observations on how these different user groups collaborated to adapt an uncertainty taxonomy to solve the proposed exercises. Furthermore, we extract a series of recommendations and future lines of work that we share with the community in an attempt to establish a common agenda of DH research that focuses on collaboration around the idea of uncertainty.

Keywords

• human–computer interaction
• digital humanities
• cultural heritage
• information visualisation
• data modelling
• uncertainty taxonomy