The kick-off day was mainly for refreshing and getting into the conceptual topic again. Starting off with a quick round of everyone telling in a few sentences what his research question is and what the current state is.
For me, I will be dealing with the topic of data visualizations and their limitations. Why there are limitations and how these problems, mostly general problems of visualizations and models, are affecting the interpretation of the result. Especially, when it comes to results which are used to derive further proceedings in terms of research, it is particularly important to be aware of these limitations.
Together with Noah Bubenhofer who is a research assistant at UZH at the Institute of Computer Linguistics and working with Corpus Linguistics, I will investigate these forms of visualization in the field of Visual Linguistics and, further on, find a way to create a way of visualizing a set of linguistic data in a more broader and accessible way. Since linguistic data, especially in the subfield of Corpus Linguistics, is extremely dependent on taking further circumstances, such as society, political and economic situations, and climate, into account in order to be correctly interpreted. This can happen not only digital, but also spatial. This not only raises awareness among the researchers about the given way of visualizing a data set, but also enables them to conduct further proceedings more precisely.
In the first exercise, we thought about 20 ways of how the prototype for our theoretical work could look like. Therefore, it was necessary to open your mind and step back from assumptions and plans you have already made. You should let go thoughts of feasibility and utopia. In my case, this is what I came up with.
Through the feedback round, I learned that it is extremely important to end up with a project that is not only understandable by researchers working in this field but also by people who are just visiting the exhibition that will follow up or see an article in the web. To be honest, I never really thought about that part because I focused on my target group of linguists very early. This input could also help to simplify the matter and keep it more tangible, not just for me or visitors but also for the researchers themselves.
