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The world’s oldest universities, including St Andrews (my case study), have started digitizing their historical student and staff records for their (in)valuable information about the ‘education-worthy’, and the institutions themselves. Current digitization comes in various forms, from scanning handwritten records and transcribing them, to applying handwritten text recognition (HTR). While text search interfaces facilitate quicker access to these collections – and protect fragile documents – they only provide a record-by-record view. By contrast, this thesis argues for representing historical university records through visualization which allows multi-perspective views on records and foregrounds their curation(s) over time by defining and showcasing the concept of Provenance-Driven Visualization (PDV). Provenance as a key parameter in the keeping of such collections has been overlooked by researchers in DH and VIS, despite emphasizing attribution as part of research ethics (trustworthiness, transparency, etc.). Even where provenance is disclosed, it is (a) partial, (b) presented through text at collection-level, or through homogenous diagrams (hiding more complex processes), and (c) typically separated from the visualization itself (in an ‘about’ page or as diagrams). By directly addressing provenance through PDV as central to the advancement of digital curation of historical university records, this thesis develops VIS and DH research by demonstrating how visualization is itself a means for knowledge discovery as well as knowledge recovery. Main chapters develop my theoretical, ethical, and applied approach to provenance visualization (PDV) using the Biographical Records of St Andrews University 1579-1897 as an indicative case to highlight (1) added transparency (to the accuracy, representation, and ‘facts’ of such collections), (2) greater inclusion and diversity of such research, when the curatorial processes and decisions behind them are visualized (to enlarge research ethics and fuel interdisciplinary research), and (3) added critical understanding of such historical collections. Conclusions present all three as key parameters for theoretical and applied VIS and DH research.

This paper conceptualizes a political ecology of atmospheres. It offers to political ecology, a field that features a strong territorial bias, a study of how the effects of dramas taking place on and off the Earth’s land surface go on to affect other spaces and places through the air and atmospheres. This interdisciplinary contribution is valuable because, as convincingly demonstrated by scholars in cognate disciplines, a dominant focus on land as territory limits understandings of the politics of environmental change. This is because, increasingly, spaces and places that are neither fixed nor grounded, such as the deep sea or outer space, are being directly and indirectly shaped by capitalist expansion. Hence, I argue for greater consideration of atmospheres in political ecology, a field that examines the often contentious relationship between the principle economic system and the environment. I develop this argument through a voluminous case study of the Guiana Shield, a highly forested, 1.7-billion-year-old Precambrian geological formation in the north of South America. I use the Guiana Shield as a spatial point of reference to argue for direct attention to be paid to the ever-evolving interplay of current and historical factors in atmospheric spaces. Combining insights from decolonial scholarship, the environmental humanities, and the wider ‘volumetric’ turn, I use ‘weathering’ as a method for analyzing the slow, microscale geological, biological, and socio-political processes through which colonial atmospheres emerged and went on to later encompass their reference points. Peer reviewed

In Une femme (1987; A Woman's Story), Annie Ernaux declared that she wished to remain “au-dessous de la littérature” (“below literature”). To what extent is this position, which she has maintained over the last decades, compatible with her consecration as a writer? This article considers the publication of Les Années (2008; The Years) as a turning point followed by the publication of several collaborative and dialogic texts that call into question established literary forms and make visible the process of creation, that it to say the poiesis of the œuvre. By revealing the act of writing, Ernaux contributes to establishing a genealogy of her work, even showing it to have a mythical dimension which is nevertheless tied to socio-political concerns. Exploring the resonance between Ernaux's literary pieces and her paratextual interventions highlights the complex network on which Ernaux's conception of writing, and position towards the idea of literature, are built. Peer reviewed