Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry

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Dunham's Data pioneers the use of data analysis in dance history through a project that centres around the case study of Katherine Dunham (1909-2006). The African American choreographer, anthropologist, teacher, curator, and author had a profound influence on dance internationally. As a choreographer and performer, she was involved with Broadway shows, operas, revues, Hollywood films, and modern concert dance. As a cultural operator she worked for and with groups ranging from important African American organizations to the United States Army, and she was also employed by both the writing and theatre arms of the Works Progress Administration. As a scholar, she contributed to the development of participant-observer ethnographic methods, and her work also anticipates the contemporary phenomenon of practice-based research. Her curatorial and administrative work ranges from curating festivals in Dakar, to building multiple cultural institutions, namely the Dunham School in New York and the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children's Workshop in St. Louis.Dunham is an exemplary figure for analysing the ways dance moves across both geographical locations and networks of cultural, artistic, and financial capital. In addition to working across many diverse contexts, she spent over one third of her life on tour. The scale and distribution of datapoints necessary to research the transnational circulation of an artist like Dunham pose a challenge for traditional scholarly approaches. Thus, tracing such global movement requires new scholarly tools. For this project, we construct digital maps that track Dunham's travel undertaken as a touring artist as well as the ways in which her works represented place. We graph the networks Dunham built across people and institutions as she conducted ethnographic research, choreographed dances, created a dance technique, and participated in social justice movements. Using such digital research methods and data visualization in the context of dance history can catalyse a better understanding of how dance movements are shared and circulated among people and continents, and the networks of support and influence that undergird artistic and economic success. In so doing we ultimately ask how dance moves between places, and how the world is imagined in dance.At the same time as we investigate the mobility of this particular historical figure, we also address the scholarly concerns that make collecting, analysing, and visualizing data meaningful for dance historical inquiry. Digital methods have altered the landscape of most humanities and arts disciplines. However, the field of dance studies has not yet realized how it can benefit from these analytic approaches, in particular for historical work, and what it can contribute to interdisciplinary conversations. Therefore, this project is not only devoted to the specific line of research regarding Dunham, but also to the original problems and questions of dance history that can be advanced through an innovative critical mixed methods approach that includes geographical mapping and network analysis. The project scope is extended through knowledge exchange collaborations with international academic partner projects, as well as through UK industry partnerships with the Victoria & Albert Museum and One Dance UK's Dance of the African Diaspora.