Visual Exploration of a Historical Vietnamese Corpus of Captioned Drawings: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study focusing on the exploratory visual analysis of a unique historical dataset consisting of approximately 4000 visual sketches and associated captions from an encyclopedic book published in 1909-1910. The book, which offers insight into Vietnamese crafts and social practices, poses the challenge of extracting cultural meaning and narrative structure from thousands of drawings and multilingual captions. Our research aims to explore and evaluate the effectiveness of multiple visualization techniques in uncovering meaningful relationships within the dataset while working closely with professional historians. The main contributions of this study include refining historical research questions through task and data abstraction, combining and validating visualization techniques for historical data interpretation, and involving a focus group of historians for further evaluation. These contributions offer generalizable insights for the development of domain-specific visualization tools and support interdisciplinary engagement in historical data visualization and critical digital humanities research.