Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795: Methods and Process
Pieces of export cloth from South Asia circulated by the Dutch West and East India Companies
In this talk Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe will discuss their digital art history project on transoceanic circulation of South Asian textiles. The central component of their ongoing digital art history project, “Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795,” is an online Visual Glossary of historic textiles. This resource unites three different data types (textual, visual, and material) and provides users with open access to data, images, and dynamic visualizations. In this presentation, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Kehoe will introduce their project's working proof-of-concept, which incorporates over 10,000 data points drawn from Dutch East and West India Company records between the years 1710 and 1715. They will discuss not only the challenges of building data sets from archival sources, but also the semantic implications of historic and cotemporary data structures. They will also talk about the process of building interactive web applications, which were made by Middlebury College undergraduate students using the programming language R over the course of a 4-week pilot course called “Data Science Across Disciplines.”
Date: April 08, 2021, Thursday, 12pm-1pm EST
About the Speakers
Dr. Carrie Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her primary area of research is the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, within which she focuses on themes related to intra- and intercultural diplomacy and gift exchange. Her first book project, The Art of Diplomacy in the Early Modern Netherlands: Gift-Giving at Home and Abroad, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press.
Dr. Marsely Kehoe (PhD 2012, University of Wisconsin) specializes in seventeenth century Dutch art history, particularly trade in the Dutch colonial world. Her manuscript on urban planning in Batavia/Jakarta, vernacular architecture in Willemstad, Curaçao, still life painting of trade objects, and the nautilus cup is under contract with Amsterdam University Press, and she has published most recently in the Journal of Early Modern History and Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. Dr. Kehoe works at Hope College, where she's involved in grants management, digital humanities, and building a Data Analytics/Science program.
The Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present webinar is generously supported by funding from Mason's College of Humanities and Social Science through the Interdisciplinary Programming Support Fund and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
