Visualizing Biographical Trajectories by Historical Artifacts: A Case Study based on the Photography Collection of Charles W. Cushman

The digitization of cultural archives and historical records is opening up new avenues for biographical research and teaching. On the one hand, historical ouevres and lifework collections can be newly visualized for different audiences. On the other hand, biographical trajectories can be represented and analyzed in an unforeseen manner. But how do visualizations of life and work go together? With this paper we reflect on ways and means how to shed light on the life of artists or other historical actors by the means of metadata provided by their ouevre. By representing the works of Charles W. Cushman in the PolyCube framework for cultural collection visualization, we shed light on aspects of his biography in a geo-temporal and categorial-temporal information space. We discuss how these visual-analytical frames of reference could be combined for their mutual contextualization, and how they can be hybridized with textual sources to provide a multimodal, narrative framework of biographical knowledge exploration and communication.