For the past 20 years I’ve been studying the links between feminist art and the women’s liberation movement. During a sabbatical a few years ago as I travelled from archive to archive I realized the centrality of Carolee Schneemann to the networks I write about. When I saw the edited collection of her letters, I began to think about about visualizing the circles. I hoped that a network analysis might reveal more about her overlapping circles and that corpus linguistics might reveal interesting aspects of her as female artist in a largely male milieu. I am not the first to notice the centrality of Schneemann. This work by Ward Shelley “laid out the people that Carolee claimed as her predecessors, then her contemporaries, that she worked with together to develop these ideas.
“Prior visualizations point to complexity of positioning an artist like Schneemann who has been assigned to 10 subject headings in SNAC. The visualization of metadata from some major archives reveals connections between the people she is also connected to, indicating the numbers of circles I am looking to visualize.