Drucker begins by illustrating how literary critics often diminish the value of visual aesthetics in favour of the "substance" of textuality. However, Drucker argues that it is critical to understand that layout, colour, typeface, and other visual markers help to convey meaning. Drucker's aim is to "propose an understanding of all graphical elements as dynamic entities." Drucker suggests that "the specific properties of evidence and obvious graphical elements, though frequently unnoticed, are an important part of semantic meaning production." In order to illustrate this, Drucker takes up the examples of William Morris' Kelmscott Chaucer and Stephane Mallarme's Un Coup de Des as evidences to the interpretative significance of the presence, or absence, of graphics.

In this article, Jessop asserts that digital technology has created a new medium for visual metaphors to perpetuate cognitive processes. Jessop argues that knowledge is created not revealed and that visualizations are one way of manifesting knowledge. Jessop argues that visualizations are characterized by three components that make them different from images more generally: they are interactive, they can be manipulated, and they communicate information. In order to illustrate these components, Jessop discusses the London Charters project. In conclusion, Jessop argues that visualizations must be understood as rhetorical devices.

Matthew Kirschenbaum's introduction to his edited issue in Computers and Humanities begins with, "Image-based humanities computing is an established practice located at the inter-section of a set of intellectual convictions regarding knowledge representation on the one hand, and the dramatically accelerating pace of technical research in digital imaging technologies on the other." Kirschenbaum defines image-based humanities broadly as a means of bringing visual tools to bear on artifacts. Kirschenbaum acknowledges that many projects involved in image-based digital projects are reaching their "initial plateau of completion", meaning that much of their material is accessible to the public. With this in mind, Kirschenbaum's overarching vision for the special issue is to address some of the key questions facing image-based digital humanities projects as well as to document the innovative work being conducted in the discipline.

The digital humanities has readily adopted visualization models from disciplines outsides of the humanities. The problem with this transfer is this is that these techniques are taken wholesale and never critically questioned in a necessary manner. By reading visualizations as "observer-independent" data, the "critical distance between the phenomenal world and its interpretation" collapses and negates the space for humanistic knowledge production. Instead, visualizations must be read as capta, Drucker argues, as capta is consumed actively instead of recorded and observed. Drucker's essay launches a call to action and a challenge to rethink the digital tools used for visualizations in the humanities.

This article examines how document repositories can be utilized for humanities research and critical interpretation. The article specifically focuses on the rapidly expanding field of text mining. A case study of 300 XML encoded letter written between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law Susan Huntingdon Dickinson was used by the authors to experiment with their methods and test their theories. The authors argue that in order for computational methods to significantly effect the humanities discipline the tools developed must be concerned with scholarly interpretation and be useable by non-experts. Using a multinomial naïve Bayes algorithm, the authors trained a computer program to "read" the Dickinson correspondence for erotic language and to then classify the letters based on the appearance (or not) of this language. The panel of literary scholars was particularly pleased by how accurately the algorithm classified the letters. Feedback was given for improving aesthetic qualities of the user interface but overall the tool proved both useful and useable.

This article explores the use of visualization to interpret relational data. The authors of this article use the Orlando Women's Writing database as the source and case study for their visualizations. The article focuses on network data and use the concept of "six degrees of separation" as its motivation behind the visual graphics. Using Mandala, the authors create networks that showcase how authors are related to other authors, topics, place, organizations, and other critical features. The hidden XML tagging of the Orlando project is also used to generate connections between data points. The authors of this article argue that an effective visualization can add insight to data that is inaccessible through text alone.