How I became a discriminating tool adopter:

A Party of One DH Tale

Michelle Moravec@professmoravec

Visualizing Schneemann

Ward Shelley. Carolee Schneemann Chart ver. 1, 2005. from Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Brooklyn Museum

• What does network analysis of Schneemann’s correspondence reveal about her overlapping circles?

• What does a corpus linguistics approach to Schneemann’s correspondence reveal about her as female artist in a largely male milieu?

418 Letters 1956-1999From -> To

Alluvial diagram made in Raw

“organizations “from all CS Lettersby Chronological Divisions from Correspondence Course

Correspondents' Sex and Occupation

Alluvial diagram made in Raw

“Circles” represented by 13 largest correspondences

Radar graph in Excel

Combined NER to get “names”

Circle Packing made in Raw

Locations in CS Letters 1956-1999Using Google Map Pro + Maps Data

TimeMapper from Unghosting Apparitional Lesbian History

Corpus Linguistics study of language as expressed in samples of "real world" textreading with machines, distant reading

• collocates = words that appear together at frequency greater than random chance in a body of texts (corpus)

• keywords = unusually frequent words in a corpus when measured against a reference corpus

“The Past” as

• “too much to the past” art history• “torment from the past” personal• “the past to the present” work • “Not to destroy the past “

revelation• “my own historic rabbit hole” art

history

Insights from Party of One DH project

• Insight #1 spend money wisely• Insight #2 Don’t just pick the popular tool• Insight #3 Google or ask for help when you need it• Insight #4 a better tool will always come along• Insight #5 invest your time in learning methods not

tools

Resources Used to Create Data Visualizations

• ABBYY FineReader Express ($)• Antconc• Excel• Gephi• Google Maps Engines Pro ($)• Maps Data• Raw

Collocates for “the” by corpora

cha

nce

not c

hanc

e

co-

occu

rren

ce (

MI)

chance not chance observed frequency differences (LL)

“too much to the past”• 1957 “the past fifty years” … “have gotten rid of some things

without which painting is not painting” (Stan Brakhage)• 1960 “The paintings change and I can say very little about

how they relate to the past or to the future.” (Mona Mellis)• 1960 “it belongs too much to the past, to my favored parts

of paintings past “ (Naomi Levinson)• 1966 After “Meat Joy” it appeared I had lost about half my

friends in the art-world-scene. Now I’ve lost the other half! This is specifically those reviewers, gallery people, performers and contacts which shelter and perpetuate a small group—an unchanging group—with which I’ve been, in the past, involved.” (Jan Van der Merck)

• 1974 (In the past my relation to spectators was overt, determined, aimed at immediacies of interchange and effect. Still I always felt something like emerging from the deep lagoon, rising up from coral reefs to grab them, catch hands . . . tipping them over out of safety, assurance that we were separate—plummeting together, the ego entities fragmented, the definitions of actioners perceivers jumbled, male female, intentions, loss of intentions. Dream deep dives. Beyond the “self” which we each cart around like the doctor’s black kit bag. (Margaret Fisher)

• 1975 “In the past I opposed the functional and the aesthetic; had elaborate and precise theories on antagonisms between functional vision and visual vision.” (Daryl Chin)

“torment from the past”

• 1962 “A sensation of love torment from the past—a self-indulgent thing indeed.” That becomes “banal” indeed “That was good sense, all that was possible in that time, sorrowful time. But fact; men of the medicine beds wanted to be needed beyond our immediate pleasure which fringed the forces of emotion.” (J-J Lebel)

• 1970 “it seems my mind is piled with contrary impulses: simplicities, complexities, the distance, all the time past without contact and the underlying sense (presumptuous, true, false, illusory, actual???) that I can—as in the past—say whatever I feel to you.” (James Tenney)

• 1973 “Of course I was crazy to leave . . . I was crazy. Being with Ant makes it all good, or me good for it all—or needing not so much of all there is to need/want. Being content on the inward center more than in the past. “ (Ann Lauterbach)

• 1975 “Now the most interesting thing which no one ever told me—[. . .] IS that one assimilates and carries intact into the future all the “images” of a friend or lover from the past and that these past selves (face, body) are immediately superimposed onto/within the changed person.”(Daryl Chin)

• 1976 the three of us in the past meetings felt deep friendship … his love in the past with he … he says we shed the past selves to be in this present moment. (Bill Thompson)

“the past to the present”

• 1967 “Jim made a tape collage from certain sounds deeply carrying for me, through the past ten years” (Joseph Berke)

• 1970 “An impulse to get rid of it—that heavy house— as I have to get rid of the weight of the past—what is past—in this present.” (James Tenney)

• 1972 “Funny, the more sense I have of present, the more the past carries, flows in…. Making tapes last night put me in touch with the past fullness.” (James Tenney)

• 1975 “as soon as viewers see the film in a generalized— present time, the personal time will have become “the past.”( Jonas Mekas)

• 1977 “she vitiates it by representing the past against which we set ourselves/or she won’t get it anyway because it’s not her authentic energy system/or if she does get “it,” write about “it,” classify us among her other critical displays we’re under glass, dead and frozen on the tract of history before we made our run” (Daryl Chin)

• 1979 “despite the remaining accumulations of what makes work and the materials of the work—still present in files, shelves, drawers, stacks against walls—despite these remains, the book has cleared the past for me . . . provided an open territory” (Barbara Smith)

“Not to destroy the past “ • 1957 “Also I have been hardly able to paint for the past three months

—partly the fault of the jobs but partly of the pregnancy which took a lot of energy from me.” (Ethel Hayes)

• 1958 “Is all this any rightness—I expect you to clarify it for me because you have seen it more—and critically—and because your letter has set me off out of the past week with unprecedented verbosity.” (Naomi Levinson)

• 1959 “Their working concept of catching the ghosts of the past which interfere with the present and thereby facing motives which are often disguised destructive forces; “not to destroy the past but to put it back where it belongs.” And from this then that the clarity of true-will create what it really wants—but also that black-will can create what primary motives cannot admit” (Naomi Levinson)

• 1959 “in the past week plummeted into a mysterious world of myth and symbol emerging with a bloody revelation concerning a primordial dualism in the masculine psyche (serpent-son), and the magical act of possession effected by image making, relating then from the first paintings of beasts to the sustained preoccupations—in time—with the nude, the female form as alternate and how and why “other.” (Naomi Levinson)

• 1982 “I suffered in the past from being made to feel that I would be an antagonist, that my life and Jane’s were contradictory rather than interlinked. Anyway the depth of old depth-charges is more than the present can bear . . . I’m happy to be present mutually.” (Stan Brakhage)

“my own historic rabbit hole.”

• 1978 I wanted to let you know something of what I’ve been doing with video over the past five years (since I’ve been back from London). (Gene Yongblood)

• 1986 Do you have my “Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology”? essay and performance notes? For it is central to work of the past five years, and touches on Goddess shadows, lost essences, denied power. (Sir Lawrence Gowing)

• 1986 “I am making some strange works lately; my fame increases as does my poverty; unable to find any teaching jobs for the past six months search; and recent exhibit in D.C. with tremendous focus by critics, collectors, artists, sold nothing.” (Charlotte Victoria)

• 1995 “the scope of my work from the past 25 years is being redressed with 15 current and future museum exhibitions” (Rosalind Krauss)

• 1999 I am amazed for the past ten years at the gallery trajectory representing younger women artists who create assertive, in your face, hostile body representations, and the art world is rewarding this work! (Cindy Carr)

Workflow

Load corpora

Negative keywords

Word frequency in each corpora

Normalize for corpora size

Collocates

Concordance plot by file

Key word in context

Concordance plot by file

Alluvial diagram made in Raw

Alluvial diagram made in Raw