Visualizing colonial regimes with interactive maps and timelines
Visualizing Colonial Regimes: A Multi-View Approach to (Historical) Political Transformation
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
This paper looks at how colonial histories are shown through maps and charts. The authors use special interactive visual tools to show how colonial classifications were made and highlight the relationships between empires and the places they controlled. Their approach combines maps with timelines to give a fuller picture of political changes over time and space. This way, the usual simple and separate views of colonial data become more complex and revealing about how history is interpreted.
colonial regimesvisualizationcritical hermeneuticspostcolonial theorytemporal flow visualizationgeographic distribution mappingVarieties of Political Regimes datasetinteractive visualizationpolitical transformation
Authors
Nicole Husemann, Steffen Kailitz, Christofer Meinecke
Abstract
This paper takes a critical approach to visualization of colonial regimes. Drawing on critical hermeneutics and postcolonial theory, we created interactive visu- alizations revealing the constructed nature of colonial categories and exposing the hierarchies between empires and territories. Using the Varieties of Political Regimes dataset, our approach combines temporal flow visualization and geo- graphic distribution mapping. This allows us to contextualize colonial rule within broader patterns of political change. Our visualization challenges conventional, static, and isolated representations of colonial data by making the interpre- tive frameworks underlying colonial categorization visible through coordinated temporal, spatial, and relational views.