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

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). Dunham’s Data was recognized with the 2021 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship.

The core project team consists of Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Tia-Monique Uzor, and previously Takiyah Nur Amin. They are joined by UK industry partners 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 Ohio State (US), Ludwig Maximilians Universität Munich (Germany), and the University of New South Wales (Australia). 
 
Through this project, we explore the kinds of questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance history. We do so through the case study of choreographer Katherine Dunham, manually cataloguing a daily itinerary of Dunham’s touring and travel from the 1930s-60s, the dancers, drummers, and singers in her employ during that time, and the repertory they performed. These curated datasets provide new means to understand the relationships between thousands of locations, and hundreds of performers and pieces across the decades of Dunham's career, and ultimately elaborate how movement moves. 
 
While digital methods have altered the landscape of most humanities and arts disciplines, the field of dance studies has yet to fully identify how it can benefit from these analytic approaches. Through the specific line of research regarding Dunham, the project addresses 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. Dunham is an exemplary figure for analysing the ways dance moves across times, places, and performers. She worked across six continents in many contexts, and also spent over one third of her life on tour, and she was also an extraordinary self-archivist. 
 
To find out more about this project, go to www.dunhamsdata.org.