Models, Objects, Ghosts: Visualizing History

Why is contemporary academic history mainly practiced through writing, while visualization of history is msotly found in museums and in non-academic genres? This essay explores five different methods of visualizing history to provide a starting point for discussions of the value of visualizations. The methods are first historical paintings, either contemporary with the events depicted or created later for the promotion of narratives. Then models are explored, both physical and virtual, followed by the practice of using ghosts to recreate the human actors of the past. The last methods are imagetexts, as introduced to the theorist William J.T. Mitchell and finally objects as a way of representing historical data. As the field of historical visualization as vast and growing, this essay hopes to inspire further discussion on the matter and possible help change to focus on text alone in academic writing.