Palladio

Palladio is a project of the Humanities + Design Research Lab at Stanford University. It is a multi-purpose engine for the display of relationships between data points; these relationships can be geographical, temporal, conceptual, or all of the above.

Palladio enables data to be visualized in four “views,” one of which is Map View. Maps in Palladio display geospatial data as either a single point, or as lines connecting two points. No coverage mapping is facilitated. The map display can be filtered by time span, and data points can be sized relative to their magnitude within the data set. Customizability is very low, and the data processing capabilities are simple; the map display can be manipulated through a maximum of two attributes at a time.

The other three Views enabled by Palladio are Graph (whose name is somewhat misleading, as its display is more of a conceptual web connecting data points and attributes); List (a table view, in which the full data set can be filtered through simple data processing parameters); and Gallery (in which images and metadata associated with data points can be viewed and filtered in a display grid).

Example Applications

Because Palladio’s Map View accommodates only point values rather than coverage, humanities research using this tool tends to focus on individual people, either in terms of their movements through the geographic landscape or in the interactions between individuals. Mapping Galileo  is an example of a project that has used Palladio to its fullest capacity. The project displays the correspondences of Galileo Galilei, referenced by geography and date; additionally, the map data can be manipulated based on the religious affiliation of Galileo’s correspondents, and whether the letters themselves are still extant or have been lost. The researchers’ creation of a highly granular data set has allowed Palladio’s modest data processing capabilities to be used to maximum effect.

Digital Humanities Potential

Palladio would best accommodate scholarship centered on geohistorical networks of individuals or ideas. A literary scholar might use Palladio to visualize the places of origin or urban movements of the Parisian literary expatriate community; a social historian might visualize the birthplaces and eventual places of death of survivors of the Titanic; a genealogist might document the personal correspondences of a geographically disparate extended family or social network. Its clean and responsive user interface, in combination with carefully-formatted data, could make it a good pedagogical tool—due to its simplicity, it could be used in a K-12 context as well as in tertiary education.

Palladio does not accommodate coverage data or statistical analysis, and cannot highlight patterns except through visual aggregation; it is thus unsuited to projects with a heavy quantitative component. Similarly, it can only display or manipulate data based on a maximum of two parameters at a time, and should thus only be used for projects in which the display needs are relatively simple.

This tool would also not be suited for projects which require a high degree of cultural contextualization or acknowledgment of subjectivity. It does not accommodate multiple authorship or plural voices, and would not readily accommodate projects requiring conceptual ambiguity. And the only way to acknowledge political, cultural, or linguistic boundaries is to import a basemap tile which already contains this data, as none of Palladio’s native basemaps include this information.

Advantages

If data is properly formatted before uploading, Palladio’s interface and interactive features are fairly intuitive and user-friendly. The TimeLine and TimeSpan features, in particular, offer easy manipulation of data based on temporal parameters. The learning curve for interacting with Palladio is gentle and does not require a high level of computer expertise. It is a solid entry-level tool for humanists who are beginning to explore the potential of geospatial analysis in the humanities.

Drawbacks

Palladio has very specific data formatting requirements in order to function at all, and it does not always clearly communicate what these requirements are. For instance, it can only read geographic coordinates coordinates as a single table value in which latitude and longitude are separated by a comma (41.008548,28.979938). This means that .csv datasets must separate each value by semicolons rather than commas, a requirement which is not made clear in Palladio’s front-end or basic documentation.

This quirk is an example of a larger pitfall to Palladio, which is its inability to make automatic inferences from inputted data. Palladio often needs to be told specifically that a given attribute falls into a particular datatype, where other programs would infer this from formatting cues (e.g. Palladio does not always recognize dates)—and, if an error is not corrected at the beginning of the project, the researcher has little recourse but to start over.

Palladio’s Map View is minimally customizable and not easily exported or shared, making it difficult to use in different contexts. Unusually for a tool designed by and for digital humanists, it also does not easily account for the acknowledgment of plural authorship. Finally, its display of geographic information can be too simplistic and contextless to accommodate humanistic complexity; none of its available base maps account for past or present political or cultural boundaries, and its depiction of point-to-point relationships as a simple arc may fail to account for the realities of historical travel.

External Links

• Palladio
• Palladio FAQ
• Humanities + Design Research Lab - Palladio Introduction