Exiled but not Forgotten: Investigating Commemoration of Musicians in Vienna After 1945 Through Visual Analytics

Abstract

How is music functionalized to urban symbolic politics in the City of Vienna after 1945 until today? To address this question, we present a novel visualization for interactive analysis of multiple biographical timelines connected to Austrian music history. Instead of simply comparing the biographies of over 200 composers, musicians, and conductors in a linear fashion, we connect them with the urban processes that constituted the topos ‘Music City Vienna’, such as street-naming, awards, anniversaries, and exhibitions. The proposed approach intertwines people, events, and locations, allowing the interactive analysis of multi-modal data. Our main goal is to explore continuities and discontinuities, to find underlying trends and different narratives. Ultimately, this work is intended to stimulate the discussion on the challenges of performing visual analytics of historical data.