Visualizing Schneemann

Update: I found many more female letters to/from Schneemann at the Getty Research Institute this summer. Check back for updates results!

As I wrote here, during the research for my book, I was struck by the centrality of Carolee Schneemann to various art world networks. As I explored the digital humanities further, I began to think of how to Visualize Schneemann.

When I began tweeting about Visualizing Schneemann, the Archives of American Art encouraged me to pursue the topic. When they announced their forthcoming symposium on digital art history, I knew the time had come to get moving. I tweeted in search of a collaborator since I find the best digital history projects entail multiple perspectives. Melissa Rogers, who I met briefly at ThatCampFeminisms East responded and we decided to collaborate. 

The complexities of Schneemann's work means that her relationships to various communities are often truncated.  For example in this genealogy, from The Art Story Schneemann is disconnected from the feminist art movement because that entity doesn't appear in this story of art.

The artist Shelly Ward created her own mapping of Carolee Schneemann's career and the artists she has influenced.

My portion of our project analyzes  Schneemann’s voluminous correspondence, published as Correspondence Course.  Duke University Press agree to provide me with a e-text for research use. Named entity recognition software will be used to extract personal names, places and organizations, which will form network visualizations in Gephi.  Concordancing software, such as AntConc, will provide a different sort of analysis to explore Schneemann’s writing about and from within different art world communities.

Because I couldn't wait to start playing (and learning Gephi) I created a " to from" visualization of letters from 1969-1975 in Correspondence Course that reveals Schneemann's heaviest correspondence was with men. That one was her partner at the time, the composer James Tenney is intriguing, but not particularly revelatory. However her correspondence with Clayton Eshleman, a poet, editor, and translator, is extremely interesting and I can't wait to see what AntConc makes of those letters.