Visualization in historical research is shifting from isolated attempts to systematic practices. However, data-driven evidence about how historians actually use visualization remains scarce. We present a corpus-driven, mixed-methods study that combines analysis of images from 4,142 research articles across history and digital humanities journals with a collaboratively developed visualization taxonomy and a semi-automatic labeling pipeline. We construct a corpus of 14,021 images, classify 4,831 visualization instances using a hierarchical, domain-informed taxonomy, and analyze patterns of visualization adoption across venues, history subfields, and time. To interpret these patterns, we conduct interviews with 11 historians and use HiFigAtlas system as a boundary object to support joint inspection of the corpus. We identify distinct roles for visualizations in historical research: primary-source, evidence-synthesis, communicative, confirmative, and exploratory. We further find that while historians pursue diverse goals with figures, persistent epistemological and practical barriers, such as uncertainty, provenance, justification burden, and publication constraints, impede the adoption of visualization. This work contributes a grounded account of visualization use in historical scholarship and points to opportunities to better support domain-specific needs.

翻译：历史研究中的可视化正从零散尝试转向系统实践。然而，关于史家实际如何使用可视化的数据驱动型证据仍十分匮乏。我们开展了一项语料库驱动的混合方法研究，融合了对来自历史学与数字人文学期刊中4,142篇研究论文图像的分析、一项协作开发的可视化分类体系，以及一个半自动标注流程。我们构建了包含14,021幅图像的语料库，利用分层且基于领域知识的分类体系对4,831个可视化实例进行分类，并分析了可视化在不同期刊、历史学分支领域及时间维度上的采纳模式。为解读这些模式，我们对11位史家进行了访谈，并以HiFigAtlas系统作为边界对象，支持对语料库的联合检查。我们识别出可视化在历史研究中的不同角色：原始史料型、证据综合型、沟通型、确证型与探索型。进一步发现，尽管史家用图表追求多元目标，但持续存在的认识论与实践障碍——例如不确定性、来源出处、论证负担及出版限制——阻碍了可视化的采纳。本研究为历史学术中可视化应用提供了实证性论述，并指出了更好支持领域特定需求的可为空间。