This post inaugurates our first homework assignment at “Building a Digital Portfolio,” which just successfully concluded its first day (you can follow the summer institute on Twitter with #doingdah15). After setting up our own domains and installing WordPress, we were asked to write a blog post on a project we were interested in working on throughout the workshop, so here we go!
As seen in the header image of this blog post, out of a variety of digital humanities methods, I am currently most interested in data visualization and network analysis. In terms of modern (late 19th to first half of the 20th century) Japanese art, which is my scholarly focus, I think a great application for this would be to utilize already published data on art exhibitions and art journal publications in Japan. The two volumes I’m starting off with are A Catalogue of Art Exhibitions during the Prewar Showa Period (Shōwaki bijutsu tenrankai shuppin mokuroku senzenhen) and A Bibliography of the Table of Contents of Art-Related Magazines (Bijutsu kankei zasshi mokuji sōran). The first volume contains data on art exhibitions held from 1926-1945: which artists displayed in which exhibitions, and sometimes the price attached to a particular work for sale. The second volume is an index that has gathered the table of contents from fifty-three major Japanese art magazines and journals that were published from 1869 to 1948.
Art exhibitions in Japan are inseparable from the art collectives that hosted them. Indeed, as stated by Alicia Volk and Satō Doshin, artist collectives (bijutsu dantai) configure prominently in 20th century Japanese art history.1 Retrospective exhibitions catalogs on this period are often accompanied by genealogical diagrams showing stylistic developments and the evolution of artist collectives . Yet these diagrams do not suffice to show the complexities of the social interactions that existed among artists at the time. For this project, I define social interactions as two or more artists displaying their works in the same exhibition and/or publishing on the same journals. I propose the use of sociograms (diagram of social links a person has), one mapping exhibitions in which artists displayed their works, and the other mapping journals on which artists published, to visualize how artists and collectives were connected through these two modern platforms of display and circulation of images and information.
A genealogy of modern Western-style painting. Atsuo Imaizumi and Koichi Ishikawa ed. The History of Modern Western-Style Painting: The West and Japan [Kindai yoga no ayumi: seiyo to nihon]. Tokyo: Toto bunka shuppan, 1955: 63.
Network analysis will allow us to see and explore a macro-view of the network formed by artist groups. I still have to read more on social network analysis to come up with a comprehensive list of findings I hope to make through my sociogram (i.e. “where’s the beef?” question), but one element I plan to investigate is the range of clusters that formed according to various categories (e.g. geographical clusters: Tokyo vs. Kyoto, Japanese mainland vs. the colonies, gender: male & female artists, sponsorship: governmental vs. extra-governmental, and group stance: conservatives vs. progressives). What kind of network structures did these clusters generate throughout the 20th century? Which figures really tightened each cluster as “closure” figures? Which artists acted as “broker” figures, bridging clusters that wouldn’t have connected otherwise? How do the networks of exhibitions and publications compare/contrast? How are these two platforms related?
All of this are a work in progress, and that is why the header image is cropped. It’s actually an incomplete sociogram that I made with Gephi, using data that I processed with Google Sheets. The green nodes are the different art exhibitions, while the orange nodes are names of artists, and the edges between them indicate that an artist displayed their work in an exhibition. I made the diagram as my first attempt at learning Gephi, and through that exploration I realized that I should add time as a dimension to make the graph more meaningful. Also, I’m anxious to get my hands on coding so I can process my data on a much bigger scale.
Although my project primarily utilizes data visualization and network analysis, I’m also excited to survey other digital humanities methodology through the workshop, and see how they can also be applicable. For instance, we will be looking at major digital art collections tomorrow, which should provide new ideas for me to think about how I could present this project as an online, visual exhibition consisting of an interactive network diagram and/or images and metadata of the artworks and magazine articles.
1. [Footnote coming soon]↩