1000 words: advanced visualization for the humanities

Abstract

1000 Words is a project to enable discoveries at extreme scale in the Humanities. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), this project aims to make advanced visualization systems attached to high performance computing resources both useful and usable for scholars in the arts and humanities. This paper describes Massive Pixel Environment (MPE), our initial effort toward this goal. Massive Pixel Environment is a software library developed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) for extending Processing sketches to multi-node tiled displays. Processing is an open source programming language and environment for creating images, animations and interactions. MPE significantly lowers the learning curve and time needed to develop software and interactive visualizations for multi-node tiled displays. We will discuss the applications and implications of MPE for the sciences, humanities, and media arts.