A Design Study of Visualizing Historical Book Movement

Abstract

Trading of 15th-century books is an area of great interest to historians. In this paper, we document the process behind an intensive design study and close collaboration with a domain expert on understanding crucial historical research questions, together with the result of the design study - BookTracker, a tool for mining and visualizing circulation and movement of the 15th-century book trade. The main contribution includes a summary of insights from the design study and BookTracker, a web application supporting historians in: (i) query-based search of user-defined path sequences, and (ii) analysis of the movement of the resulting user-defined path sequences through multiple visualization techniques. We discuss and summarize the value and logistics of conducting this design study, which could become generalizable lessons for the visualization design methodology.