Illuminating past labor: Making transformation processes of historical documents visible

Historical documents often undergo transformations–transcription, annotation, re-formatting, and digitization–as part of preservation or humanistic inquiry. These processes modify documents’ content, artifactual form, and structure, which subsequently influences the ways in which they are read, explored, and interpreted. Transparency of such processes ensures proper attribution of curators’ labor, promotes greater inclusiveness, and enables a more holistic and critical interpretation of historical records. But how to engage with and make visible these transformation processes? In this paper, we begin to address this question through a visualization case study based on an exemplary collection of biographical student records from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) that date back to the 18th century. We present – illustrated through this case study - a methodology based on visual (re)-interpretations of historical records over time which, we believe, is relevant to a wide range of information collections within and beyond humanities research.