Visualization is a central method in the digital humanities for revealing patterns, trends, and relationships in data. It translates information into graphical forms, thereby enabling an analytical view of large cultural collections that would be difficult to access through text or tables alone.

A distinction can be made between classical visualization and direct visualization, as defined by Lev Manovich. Classical visualizations often abstract data into points, lines, bars, or areas. One example is the MoMA visualization, which uses a cumulative stacked line graph to show how the number of works in the collection, broken down by nationality, has evolved over time. The individual artworks take a back seat to aggregated categories, thereby revealing broader historical trends and shifts in collection policy.

Direct visualization, on the other hand, takes a different approach: it does not completely replace cultural objects with abstract symbols, but rather incorporates them directly into the representation. In the visualization of the Smithsonian’s modern art collection, the works are plotted on a graph based on their median brightness relative to their creation date. Instead of simple data points, 16×16-pixel thumbnails of the artworks are used. This allows the objects to remain visible as images while simultaneously making their color characteristics comparable. Thus, one can see how the art landscape has changed over the period from 1750 to the present—not only through their position on the coordinate system but also directly within the images. For example, it is easy to see that oil portraits lost popularity over the course of the 19th century.