Visualizing colonial rule through time and geography to reveal power structures
Visualizing Colonial Regimes: A Multi-View Approach to (Historical) Political Transformation
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Maps and charts often show colonial empires in fixed ways that hide how they changed and the ideas behind them. The authors used data about different political regimes over time to make interactive visualizations that show colonial rule as something shaped by complex histories and unequal relationships. Their tools let viewers see how empires evolved and how territories were categorized, showing the stories and power differences behind old maps. This helps people understand colonial history more deeply by making its assumptions visible.
What this means in practice
- •For data journalists: Create interactive reports that reveal historical power dynamics behind colonial boundaries using coordinated time and map visualizations.
- •For museum exhibit designers: Develop engaging displays that illustrate how colonial categories and empires changed over time and space, enhancing visitor understanding.
Tested on one dataset.
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.