  Transcription, annotation, digitization and/or visualization are common
transformations that historical documents such as national records, birth/death
registers, university records, letters or books undergo. Reasons for those
transformations span from the (physical) protection of the original materials
to disclosure of 'hidden' information or patterns within the documents. Even
though such transformations bring new insights and perspectives on the
documents, they also modify the documents' content, structure, and/or
artifactual form and thus, occlude prior knowledge and interpretation. When it
comes to visualization as a means to transform historical documents from
written to abstract visual form, there is typically little acknowledgment or
even understanding of the previous transformation steps these documents have
gone through. The 'tremendous rhetorical force' of visualization, we argue,
should not be at the expense of the multiple pasts, contexts, and curators that
are inherent in historical record collections. Rather, the urgent question for
the fields of visualization and the (digital) humanities is how to better
support awareness of these multiple layers of interpretation and the people
behind them when representing historical documents. We begin to address this
question based on a collection of historical university records by (a)
investigating common transformation processes of historical documents, and (b)
discussing opportunities and challenges for making such transformations
transparent through what we call 'provenance-driven visualization'; the idea
for a visualization that makes visible the layers of transformation (including
interpretation, re-structuring, and curation) inherent in historical documents.
