Vedere e non vedere. Sulla visualizzazione dei dati nelle discipline umanistiche

A new kind of humanities, digital humanities, came with a new practice – data visualization: histograms, scatterplots, networks… In this article, we aim to uncover the hidden assumptions of this new practice, by reviewing sixtyodd DH studies published in the last decade. We distinguish three groups of visualizations: historical ones, which show temporal trends; morphological ones, which show the structural properties of texts and corpora; finally, the ones that depict “historical morphology.” Historical morphology is by far the rarest kind of visualization, and yet it should become an essential part of a theory-driven quantitative cultural history.