| Summary: | The creation of images has been an activity since the beginning of human society: our early ancestors painted or carved rocks with depictions of their lifestyles and beliefs. Rocks are not very portable, however, and humans like to share their visualisations and the knowledge contained within them. Much investment in technology has focused on the ability to create, replicate and disseminate visual information, from early print materials to attempts at chemical photography and recently, the development of ever more complex computational methods to represent visual information in a variety of ways. Visualisations are an important means of communication, a source of information and a focus of both social interaction and scholarly activity. Images and visualisations play an important role in cultural and social history, can contain valuable historical information and are used more and more in academic research that aims to study culture in its widest sense: focussing on artefacts and cultural produce.
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