Longhand is a tool for visualizing natural language datasets in virtual reality. You can think of Longhand as an immersive word cloud, but, instead of representing an array of common words in a text corpus as 2D chart, Longhand distributes 3D models representing instances of those words in 360 degrees, in an interactive virtual environment.
In addition to exposing text-centric researchers to the historically STEM-oriented benefits of virtual reality (e.g. depth cues, body tracking, increased field-of-view, etc.), Longhand leverages contemporary vision science to maximize the volume of information in a scene, thereby allowing the end user to take in 100s or even 1000s of text tokens at a glance.
In its current, alpha form, Longhand is little more than a proof-of-concept and some programming knowledge is necessary to use the system. But with the help of the passionate and knowledgeable student developers on the Discovery Student Team, even non-technical digital humanists will be able to begin analyzing their datasets in virtual reality.
