Rewriting history towards diagrammatic hypertext for digital historiography

Abstract

It is argued that historians should make explicit their causal claims in their narrative explanations for better communication of research findings. The poster presents experiments for an approach towards visual historiography to support historical understanding. A case study from historical sociology demonstrates the added value of diagrammatic representation of causal narratives. The advantage of using diagrams with a hypertextual approach is that idiographic details can still be communicated through textual information in the hypertext nodes due to multimodal combination of diagram and written language. I suggest a semantic wiki with suitable domain ontologies as a tool for structured writing-i. e. modeling-of causal processes as described in causal narratives. As the approach enables the (re)presentation of history as diagram by means of diagrammatic reasoning according to Peircean semiotics I propose the label diagrammatic hypertext.