POLIS: Designing a Visualization Tool for the Research of Complex Sociopolitical Landscapes

While sophisticated information visualization tools promise exciting transformations in scholarship, translating those capabilities into practical solutions can prove challenging. The “polis” project, a the product of the Stanford Classics Department, is a multi-year effort to create a visualization application capable of enabling research into the sociopolitical landscape of the Ancient Greek world. Researchers working on the polis project have digitized Oxford Classical Dictionary entries regarding over 2300 people and have united this data with information from the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis on over one thousand Greek cities. Through an assessment of the polis application, we demonstrate the way data visualization can facilitate original scholarly research employing large and highly rich data sets. An interactive cartographic map that provides its users with an overview of the Ancient Greek world constitutes the core of the application. This map allows the user to combine over forty filtering criteria to generate customized representations of the Greek world. Basic statistical tools enable the calculation of counts and correlations. The user can then see different maps side-by-side in a “comparison view” that enables patterndetection and the discovery of trends. Although the particular data sets visualized in this application are of special interest to classicists, the application design itself can generalize to other domains. One of the broader questions we address is how to use the tools of computer science to address research needs in the humanities. This project is a case study in using sophisticated solutions such as d3 to generate data-visualization tools capable of solving problems for humanities scholars.