Visualising discourse and argumentation structures of digital cultural heritage collections. The example of the scientific estate of Ernst von Glasersfeld

Since 2013, a part of the Ernst von Glasersfeld Archive – which is located at the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck/Austria – can be used in a digital form. In our interdisciplinary research project (DigiVis) at the Department of Media, Society and Communication at the University of Innsbruck, this digital collection served as a showcase for the development of different digital and didactic approaches for written, pictorial and other sources. In order to gain access to the content, Ernst von Glasersfeld’s academic papers were examined and analysed with regard to argumentative structures and discourse strands. We used MediaWiki as basis for the storage, annotation and structuring of the texts. Humanities scholars, computer scientists as well as a data visualization expert collaborated to develop methods of visualisation, structuring and simplification in order to provide a ‘bird’s-eye view’ of the complex argumentation structures and discourses of Glasersfeld’s texts.