1. How I became a
discriminating tool adopter:
A Party of One DH Tale
Michelle Moravec
@professmoravec

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

4. • 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?

5. 418 Letters 1956-1999
From -> To
Alluvial diagram made in Raw

6. “organizations “from all CS Letters
by Chronological Divisions from Correspondence Course

7. Correspondents' Sex and Occupation
Alluvial diagram
made in Raw

8. “Circles” represented by
13 largest correspondences
Radar graph in Excel

9. Combined NER to get
“names”
Circle Packing made in Raw

10. Locations in CS Letters 1956-1999
Using Google Map Pro + Maps Data
TimeMapper from Unghosting Apparitional Lesbian History

11. Corpus Linguistics study of language as
expressed in samples of "real world" text
reading with machines, distant reading
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•
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

12. “The Past” as
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“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

13. Insights from
Party of One DH project
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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

14. Resources Used to Create
Data Visualizations
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ABBYY FineReader Express ($)
Antconc
Excel
Gephi
Google Maps Engines Pro ($)
Maps Data
Raw

15. chance

not chance
co-occurrence (MI)
Collocates for “the”
by corpora
chance

not chance
observed frequency differences (LL)

16. “too much to the past”
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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)

17. “torment from the past”
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1962 “A sensation of love torment from the past—a selfindulgent 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)

18. “the past to the present”
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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)

19. “Not to destroy the past “
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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)

20. “my own historic rabbit
hole.”
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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)

21. Workflow

22. Load corpora
Collocates
Negative keywords
Word frequency in
each corpora
Normalize for
corpora size
Concordance plot by file
Key word in context
Concordance plot by file

23. Alluvial diagram
made in Raw

24. Alluvial diagram
made in Raw