Over the past 50 years, the influence of visuals has impacted society with greater frequency. No subject is immune from the power of visual culture, and this fact becomes especially pronounced with regards to history and historical discourse. Where once the study of the past was books and printed articles, the environment has changed and students now enter the lecture hall with a sense of history that has been gleaned from television, film, photography, and other new media. They come to understand history based on what they have seen and heard, not what they have read. What are the implications of this process, this visualization of history? Mark Moss discusses the impact of visuals on the study of history with an examination of visual culture and the future of print. Recognizing the visual bias of the younger generations and using this as a starting point for teaching history is a critical component for reaching students. By providing an analysis of photography, film, television, and computer culture, Moss uses the Holocaust as an historical case study to illustrate the ways in which visual culture can be used to bring about an awareness of history, as well as the potential for visual culture becoming a driving force for social and cultural change.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

Information may be beautiful, but our decisions about the data we choose to represent and how we represent it are never neutral. This insightful history traces how data visualization accompanied modern technologies of war, colonialism and the management of social issues of poverty, health and crime. Discussion is based around examples of visualization, from the ancient Andean information technology of the quipu to contemporary projects that show the fate of our rubbish and take a participatory approach to visualizing cities. This analysis places visualization in its theoretical and cultural contexts, and provides a critical framework for understanding the history of information design with new directions for contemporary practice.