Tomas Vancisin
Research Associate in Interactive
Data Visualization
School of Law (PeaceRep)
University of Edinburgh
PhD researcher
School of Computer Science
University of St Andrews
St Andrews HCI Research Group (SACHI)
Research Interests:
Digital Humanities
Information Visualization
Digital Heritage
RESEARCH
Legacies of the Empire
School of History, University of St Andrews
In summer 2023 I worked as a postgraduate research assistant for the Legacies of the Empire Project, exploring how the University of St Andrews benefited from the British colonial past. Using the database I developed during my PhD, I visualized birth locations, career paths, and alumni occupations in the British colonies.
Career paths of St Andrews students travelling to and from the British colonies between 1700 and 1897.
PhD Research
School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews
My research is at the intersection of Information Visualization, Digital Humanities, and History. I work with historical student and staff biographical records from the University of St Andrews spanning the period 1579-1897, and I have been focusing on visualizing the transformations these records have gone through in the past century (manual transcription, content expansion, digitization etc.). The aim of this work is to highlight transparency, emphasize people's labor, and provide more critical understanding of such historical collections.
Visualizing the transformations of the University records 1888 - 2022
Visualizing the transformations of the University records 1888 - 2022 and the information within the records.
Publications:
Vancisin, T., Clarke, L., Orr, M., & Hinrichs, U. (2023). Provenance Visualization: Tracing People, Processes and Practices Through a Data-Driven Approach to Provenance. In 2023 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford University Press.
Vancisin, T., Orr, M., & Hinrichs, U. (2020, October). Externalizing Transformations of Historical Documents: Opportunities for Provenance-Driven Visualization. In 2020 IEEE 5th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) (pp. 36-42). IEEE.
Vancisin, T., Orr, M., & Hinrichs, U. (2020). Illuminating Past Labor: Making Transformation Processes of Historical Documents Visible. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2020 (DH20).
Apart from the transformations of the records and ways in which they can be brought to the fore throught visualization, I also developed a large variety of visualizations to enable studying the information within the historical records from new perspectives.
Using Tableau to visualize students' birth locations and college affiliation 1747 - 1897.
Using D3, Leaflet and Marker-Clustering to visualize graduates of the University 1747 - 1897.
Emphasizing differences between current political map and a map from the period when the British empire was at its greatest.
Using GeoJSON and D3 to map the development of academic networks.
Exploring career locations network through edge-bundling in D3.
Exploring student paths to other universities in the UK and Europe using Leaflet and Echarts.
Publication:
Vancisin, T., Crawford, A., Orr, M. M., & Hinrichs, U. (2018). From People to Pixels: Visualizing Historical University Records. In Transimage 2018: Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference 2018 (pp. 41-57)
Lost Detectives
School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews
During my PhD research I worked as a research assistant for the Lost Detectives project at the School of Modern Languages in St Andrews. The aim of this Knowledge Exchange and Impact project was to bring works of nineteenth-century Russian crime fiction to greater public prominence through adaptation.
Illustration (Carol Adlam) for the Lost Detectives project and the official website developed by me.
About Me
For more information about me and my work, here is my CV.