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DUNHAM’S DATA: KATHERINE DUNHAM AND DIGITAL METHODS FOR DANCE HISTORICAL INQUIRY


MAIN NAVIGATION

 * ABOUT
 * PORTFOLIO
 * PEOPLE
 * PARTNERS
 * RESEARCH BLOG
 * WHERE WE’LL BE
 * RESOURCES
 * CONTACT




ABOUT DUNHAM’S DATA

Dunham’s Data is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC
AH/R012989/1, 2018-2022), under the direction of Kate Elswit (PI, University of
London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and Harmony Bench (CI, The
Ohio State University). We are thrilled that our team — Bench, Elswit, Antonio
Jimenez-Mavillard, and Tia-Monique Uzor — is recipient of the 2021 Award for
Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship jointly given by the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the American Society for Theatre
Research.

Dunham’s Data explores the kinds of questions and problems that make the
analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance history, through the
case study of 20th century African American choreographer Katherine Dunham. We
manually curate datasets from a large body of undigitized primary source print
materials that Dunham herself chose to save, held by seven archives across the
United States, which find meaning and expression in tandem with exploratory
static and interactive data visualizations. These document the daily itinerary
of Dunham’s touring and travel from the 1930s-60s; the over 300 dancers,
drummers, and singers who appeared with her; and the shifting configurations of
the nearly 300 repertory entities they performed. Together they provide new
means to understand the relationships between thousands of locations, and
hundreds of performers and pieces across decades of Dunham's performing career,
and ultimately elaborate how movement moves across bodies and geographies.

Our team process of intentional data curation, analysis, and visualization is
exploratory, iterative, and self-reflexive, guided by a commitment to humanistic
scholarly argument. Our essays engage with both the underlying methodologies and
the historical insights that emerge. The online project portfolio is designed as
a wayfinder to draw connections between multi-modal outputs: datasets,
interactive and static visualizations, datasets and user guides, and essays. We
are also completing a limited-edition box set that will preserve key outputs in
physical form. 

Dunham’s Data contributes to understanding how digital humanities can engage
intellectual and methodological problems that matter to dance scholars. In turn,
we ask how dance might inform interdisciplinary data-driven approaches to
evidencing and elaborating embodied knowledge within historical study more
broadly. Throughout our research process, we grapple with the dance-based
knowledge practices indexed by each datapoint, the embodied intercultural and
intergenerational memories of which Dunham’s repertory was composed, and the
physical toll of maintaining a transnational career as a Black female performer
across many decades. Conversations that began with the Institute for Dunham
Technique Certification during Dunham’s Data have evolved into a new project
partnership to explore data curation that begins from the dance studio as site
for the body-to-body transmission of history. We are also continuing to
experiment with the possibilities of a “choreographic syntax” that imbues data
visualizations with meaningful motion to better represent dance’s “visceral
data.”

Project partners include One Dance UK’s Dance of the African Diaspora and the
Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as international knowledge exchange
partnerships with digital projects at The Ohio State University (US), Ludwig
Maximilians Universität Munich (Germany), and the University of New South Wales
(Australia). The datasets associated with Dunham’s Data were acquired by the
National Archive for Data on Arts and Culture, and the full website and
portfolio were selected for archiving in the Library of Congress’s Performing
Arts Web Archive


PORTFOLIO




PEOPLE


CORE PROJECT TEAM

Kate Elswit (Principal Investigator)

Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies
combines dance history, performance studies theory, cultural studies,
experimental practice, and technology. She is author of Watching Weimar Dance
(Oxford University Press 2014), about the strange things people claimed to see
while watching dances in and from the Weimar Republic, which won both the Oscar
G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research and honorable mention for the Callaway
Prize. Her new book is about the interdependence of Theatre & Dance (Palgrave
2018). Further awards and prizes include a postdoctoral Mellon fellowship at
Stanford University, the Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics, the
Gertrude Lippincott Award, and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize.
Together with Harmony Bench, her digital work has been funded by a Battelle
Engineering, Technology, and Human Affairs (BETHA) Endowment Grant through The
Ohio State University, and most recently a project grant from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She is Professor of Performance and
Technology and Head of Digital Research at the Royal Central School of Speech
and Drama, University of London, and also works as a choreographer, dramaturg,
and curator.

Harmony Bench (Co-Investigator)

Harmony Bench is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio
State University, where she is also affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies and Translational Data Analytics. Her research addresses
practices, performances, and circulations of dance in the contexts of digital
and screen media. She is author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures,
and the Common with University of Minnesota Press in 2020. She has also
contributed to The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, Routledge Dance
Studies Reader (3rd ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen,
Choreographies of 21st Century War, and Dance on Its Own Terms, as well as Dance
Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital
Media, Participations, and Performance Matters, among others. For several years,
Harmony has collaborated with Kate Elswit on bringing the digital humanities and
dance history into greater dialogue, most recently with Dunham’s Data: Katherine
Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (Ref: AH/R012989/1).
From 2014-2019, she was co-editor of The International Journal of Screendance
with Simon Ellis.

Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard (Digital Humanities Post doctoral Research Assistant)

Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard joins Dunham’s Data from the CulturePlex Lab, Western
University (Canada). His main research interests lie in the use of data analysis
to understand society and culture. He applies methods from the Digital
Humanities and Machine Learning to cultural data in order to gain insight into a
wide diversity of cultural phenomena. His doctoral work took a computational
approach to gastronomic culture, resulting in publications in AI & Society and
Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, among others. Additional interests include
the application of such approaches to psychology and human behavior, new and
social media, storytelling communities, and indigenous peoples, to name a few. 
His most recent project is at the crossroads between writing and sociology, in
which he analyses one million stories from the online storytelling platform
Wattpad to examine millennials’ motivations and needs according to their
fictional self-expressions in Wattpad stories — this interdisciplinary project
aims ultimately to understand modern society’s needs and motivations. Antonio
continues to work as Research Assistant at the CulturePlex.

Tia-Monique Uzor (Dance History Postdoctoral Research Assistant)

Tia-Monique Uzor is a dance scholar and practitioner. Her research explores
themes of identity, cultural traffic, movement, and popular culture within
African and African Diasporic dance. She uses postcolonial embodied research
methods together with movement analysis to consider the many ways in which dance
comments on wider cultural, political and societal issues. Tia-Monique has both
presented and taught internationally, and her research is published within
collections in the fields of dance, geography and Black feminism. Her AHRC and
Midlands4Cities-funded PhD is due to be awarded in February 2020 and she
currently sits on the Academic Advisory Committee for Dance of the African
Diaspora (DAD) at One Dance UK. Outside of the academy, Tia-Monique writes,
choreographs and dances in various contexts.

Takiyah Nur Amin (Dance History Postdoctoral Research Assistant, 2018-2019)

Takiyah Nur Amin (Ph.D., Temple University) is a dance scholar, educator and
consultant. Her research focuses on 20th century American concert dance, African
diaspora dance performance/aesthetics and pedagogical issues in dance studies.
Her research has appeared in several academic journals including The Black
Scholar, Dance Chronicle, Dance Research Journal, the Western Journal of Black
Studies and the Journal of Pan-African Studies. Her book chapters have been
published or are forthcoming in the edited volumes Jazz Dance: A History of Its
Roots and Branches, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen,
Rethinking Dance History and Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the
21st Century (Duke University Press, 2019.) Dr. Amin is a twice-elected board
member of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), co-founder of CORD's
Diversity Working Group, a founding member of the Collegium for African Diaspora
Dance (CADD) and a host on the New Book Network's Dance Channel. An
"interdisciplinary humanist," Dr. Amin teaches courses in dance history, Black
aesthetics and the sociocultural role of dance in human society. Takiyah Nur
Amin is a proud native of Buffalo, NY and is the eldest daughter of Karima and
the late Abdul Jalil Amin.


ADVISORY BOARD

Takiyah Nur Amin (College of Wooster)
Christopher Balme (Ludwig Maximilians Universität Munich)
Jonathan Bollen (University of New South Wales)
Meghan Cope (University of Vermont)
Saroya Corbett (Institute for Dunham Technique Certification)
Sara Johnson (University of California San Diego)
Nike Jonah (Afrovibes UK)
Susan Manning (Northwestern University)
Mercy Nabirye (One Dance UK, Dance of the African Diaspora)
Harvey Miller (The Ohio State University)
Libby Smigel (The Library of Congress)
Juan-Luis Suárez (University of Western Ontario)


PARTNERS


Victoria and Albert Museum
One Dance UK, Dance of the African Diaspora
Ludwig Maximilians Universität Munich, Global Theatre History
University of New South Wales and AusStage


RESEARCH BLOG

We gather data from archival sources and leverage existing digital visualization
tools to test their capacity for dance historical analysis. We then develop
bespoke software components customized for the inquiry of this
specific movement-based, multicorporeal project.

Our Research Blog is where we have shared our thinking and doing in progress, as
well as reflections from our expert users.


WHERE WE'LL BE

We have had opportunities to share earlier iterations of this research at
University of California Berkeley, University of California Riverside, Ludwig
Maximilians Universität Munich, the American Society for Theatre Research, the
Dance Studies Association, and Dance Fields.
 
Here are some upcoming events for Dunham’s Data

 * October 2023 — German Society for Dance Research and German Dance Archive
   Cologne, (Virtual) Ecologies in the Field of Dance (Germany)
 * October 2023 — Harvard University, MetaLAB, Data Kinesthetics (US)
 * July 2023 — Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) 2023,
   Radical Reimagining: Interplays of Physical and Virtual (UK)
 * June 2023 — University of Birmingham, Stuart Hall / Centre for Contemporary
   Cultural Studies, Building Global Digital Humanities Projects (UK)
 * March 2023 — Freie Universität, Critical Digital Summer School (Germany)
 * February 2023 — National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture / ICPSR Love
   Data Week (US)
 * February 2023 — National Dance Education Organization (US)
 * December 2022 — UPES School of Liberal Arts, International Conference on
   Digital Humanities, Dehradun (India)
 * November 2022 — Newberry Library, Smith Center for the History of
   Cartography, Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography
   (US)
 * October 2022 — Dance Studies Association, Vancouver (Canada)
 * July 2022 — DH2022, Association of Digital Humanities Organizations, Tokyo
   (Japan)
 * June 2022 — Movement Computing, Chicago (US)
 * May 2022 — DH Unbound 2022, Association for Computers and the Humanities and
   CSDH/SCHN
 * March 2022 — University of Toronto, Institute for Dance Studies / iSchool
   (Canada)
 * February 2022 — Graphs and Networks in the Humanities: Technologies, Models,
   Analyses, and Visualizations (Netherlands)
 * November 2021 — Producing Memory in Dance: Oral History and Mnemotechnics,
   Université Côte d’Azur and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Italy)
 * November 2021 — Temple University, Dance Studies Colloquium, Philadelphia
   (US)
 * November 2021 — Modernist Studies Association, Chicago (US) 
 * October 2021 — American Society for Theatre Research, San Diego (US)
 * October 2021 — Dance Studies Association, New Brunswick (US)
 * July 2021 — Association for Computers and the Humanities (US)
 * May 2021 — Dance Research Matters, Coventry (UK)
 * February 2021 — National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture / ICPSR Love
   Data Week (US)
 * November 2020 — American Society for Theatre Research, New Orleans (US)
   *postponed due to COVID-19
 * November 2020 — What is the Digital Doing? A Workshop in the Interface, Freie
   Universität, Berlin (Germany)
 * September 2020 — Columbia University, Studies in Dance University Seminar,
   New York (US)
 * July 2020 — DH2020, Ottawa (Canada) *cancelled due to COVID-19
 * May 2020 — London Theatre Seminar (UK) *cancelled due to COVID-19
 * March 2020 — University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
 * March 2020 — Humane Infrastructures, UCLA Experimental Humanities (US)
 * February 2020 — Collegium on African Diasporic Dance, Durham (US)
 * November 2019 — Re:generations, Dance of the African Diaspora / One Dance UK,
   Salford (UK)
 * November 2019 — Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture Series, University of
   Tennessee Humanities Center, Knoxville (US)
 * October 2019 — MOCO International Conference on Movement and Computing, Tempe
   (US)
 * July 2019 — Association for Computers and the Humanities, Pittsburgh (US) 
 * March 2019 — Current Research in Digital History symposium, Arlington (US)
 * October 2018 — Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black conference,
   University of Maryland (US)
 * October 2018 — Making Change Through the Humanities, Royal Institute of
   Technology, Stockholm (Sweden)
 * July 2018 — International Federation for Theatre Research, working group on
   Digital Humanities in Theatre Research, Belgrade (Serbia)

 


LEARN MORE ABOUT KATHERINE DUNHAM

For further resources on Katherine Dunham, including a special video by Dr.
Halifu Osumare on “Katherine Dunham as an African American Choreographer in the
Pre-Civil Rights Colonial Era,” visit our Resources page.

 

 


MAILING LIST

We invite you to join our mailing list to hear how the project is growing and
where we will be presenting our work. If you want to get in touch, please email
both bench.9@osu.edu and kate.elswit@cssd.ac.uk

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