“I bought a piece of Roman furniture on the Internet. It's quite good but low on polygons.”—Digital Visualization of Cultural Heritage and its Scholarly Value in Art History

Abstract

This paper looks at select practices in computer-based visualization of cultural heritage and raises questions about evaluation criteria for digital scholarship in this area of arts and humanities research. The premise here is the acknowledgment of the complexity of computer-based visualization and significance of earlier research. Scholarly visualization is considered as a mode of inquiry and form of communication. The process of visualization involves manipulation. Scholarly visualization of heritage may only be recognized as valid and ethical—it is argued—when accompanied by paradata, i.e., the documentation of the evaluative, analytical, deductive, interpretative, and creative decisions made in the course of research.