Digital Analysis of Feminist Art Manifestos

Description

This article, based on two of the author’s digital humanities projects, explores the systemic and structural barriers that limit the utility of social network analysis for feminist artists. The first project analyzed the artist Carolee Schneemann’s female circles through a correspondence network. The second project traced the circulation of feminist art manifestos in the US. Three factors are identified as constraining network analysis: lack of feminist artists’ archives, an insufficient amount of machine-readable material, and the limited availability of metadata pertaining to them. Network analysis therefore is best viewed as supplemental to other digital approaches for studying this group.