What are the affordances that visualization tools offer humanities scholars dealing with either "big data" or deep reading of a text? 

---How would you integrate visualization into your own research interests?
As the saying goes a “picture is worth thousand words.” This saying just did not come about because it had no meaning. It really speaks the “truth” or “something” that sometimes words cannot express and images do. There are some ideas or expressions that words cannot capture and images can. One can go as far and say that some ideas or expression require both (written and drawn images) to be understood.

--That said, I have to say that I disagree with Stefan Sinclair's comment:

In this context, there is an important difference between static and interactive visualizations. A static visualization aims to produce a single perspective on available information. Conventional pie charts, bar charts, and graphs are good examples—these eighteenth-century inventions of William Playfair provide the reader with useful ways to understand information (Tufte), but they are fundamentally tools for display (nevertheless subject to a variety of interpretations of the visual information). Interactive visualizations, on the other hand, aim to explore available information, often as part of a process that is both sequential and iterative. That is, some steps come before others, but the researcher may revisit previous steps at a later stage and make different choices, informed by the outcomes produced in the interim. In a pie chart, by contrast, a static, synchronic object, the visual subdivision of the whole into parts can be useful, but the format does not readily lend itself to experimentation.

I feel that what Stefan Sinclair is creating is his own definitions of what visualization should be. Sure, he is placing in "this" context of the humanities, but it does lend itself to all forms of what visualization fall into. Be it static or dynamic, images can have both elements of static and dynamic impact. To me visualization is anything that is not text. However, when fonts are changed and displayed differently, then text no longer becomes text. So I have to agree with Alberto Cairo in "Why Visualize." However, it makes a complex case when one tries to differentiate how visual images affect our lives. That if we decided to remove all these images, that we would be lost for a while. That if all we had was text, then we would have to modify and update who we express our thoughts. 

--I feel that when one is presented with huge amounts of data or text, that one can become lost with all of this information. And this can have a problem as one is trying to make meaning with the reading. The brain can only process so much. One way to combat this flood of text information is to bundle them into images, which people can understand. 

--The way I would use visualization, which I feel everyone does, is to use the “tools” in my Word document, which allow one to change font size and color, etc. One might not think this as visualization, but I feel that by highlighting (or any visualization change on the page) a text, one is engaging in visualization (and not the text). Simple visualizations of this kind enhance our understanding of the text material. Just having the same font size with no diversity in color and shape, makes the text look all the same after couple of hours, By changing font and color to a page, I believe one is engaging in visualization that enhances our comprehension of the material.