Visualizing Visual Haggard
Visual Haggard is a digital archive intended to preserve, centralize, and improve access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925). The majority of Haggard’s approximately fifty novels were lushly illustrated, many of them repeatedly in different editions and by different illustrators. Illustration was always an essential part of reading Haggard’s romances during the nineteenth-century. Visual Haggard seeks to revalue and reintegrate the illustrations of Haggard's novels as unique artworks and texts for contemporary audiences.
The student teams responsible for creating the data visualizations on Visualizing Visual Haggard composed data sets about the illustrations affiliated with one Haggard novel. Descriptive tags concerning setting, character names, and style of art, among other topics, served as a form of close reading and provided material for debate about contentious labels. In the process of writing tags, students noticed patterns across their assigned novel’s illustrations, which their visualizations express. To read a full explanation of the pedagogical motivations for this assignment please see my post "Using Digital Archives to Teach Data Set Creation and Visualization Design" for the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker blog.
Visitors unacquainted with Haggard's romance fictions are encouraged to review the Haggard Bibliography and Timeline before exploring the data visualizations, which can be accessed from the dynamic Connections chart above or else by novel using the Table of Contents below.