Duquesne University (English PhD)

<Use the arrows to move through the StoryMap (or view in full screen)>

In alliance with the goals of the larger en dehors garde project, my StoryMap attempts to turn outward from the center of the avant garde by discussing not only the life and works of Mina Loy, but also those elements of her life that remain marginal in avant-garde discourses that privilege literary production and criticism over other valuable and equally important forms of labor (like emotional and familial labor) and production. This project aspires to fill those discursive gaps by juxtaposing visual, verbal, and geographic transits to create a story that is a map and a map that is a story. Like the larger website, this project is inspired by Loy’s fascination with Baedeker maps and attempts to map spaces, lives, arts, and times in an effort to encourage alternatives methods of knowledge transmission and meaning making.

To that end, this project asks: how can digital humanities be used to relay an assemblage of experiences of a single life in such a way that it feels as if a viewer is visually, emotionally, temporally, and spatially walking alongside the artist herself?

When accessing the StoryMap, viewers are able to travel alongside Loy from her birth in London of 1882 to her death in Aspen, Colorado, 1966. Through design, I hope to encourage viewers to linger in the specific places and time periods in which Loy lived. On several map locations, photographs of the interiors of specific places, like the Abbey of Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris, are provided to help viewers visualize such spaces, while at the same time archived photos are juxtaposed against contemporary photographs to explore and document the demonstrable changes that occur when socio-political events intersect with landscape, relationships, and artistic practices. Viewers can also zoom in to access, when available, the specific addresses at which Loy was known to have lived or frequented, such as her apartments in Florence and New York City, so as to visit such places and experience them for themselves. True to our experience in the world, the map ensures that the boundaries between any one aspect of a moment, place, or artistic production are never disconnected and always in constant communication in a never-ending exchange of energy (a concept that fascinated Loy herself), which continues today not only through this project but through all of you reading just now.

• For a basic chronology of Loy’s migrations, see Mina Loy’s Migrations in Timelines.

• For more in-depth scholarly interpretations of Loy’s migrations, see Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers.

This StoryMap was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool StoryMap JS.

Click on the map to view a larger size.

For more on Loy’s activities, writing, and art in New York, see the following chapters in Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Guide for Digital Traveler

• Suzanne W. Churchill, “Pas de Deux: Mina Loy & Alfred Stieglitz Dance Dada“
• Susan Rosenbaum, “Surrealism on the Move: New York, 1937-1953“

Digital Humanities Lab, University of Georgia, Athens

Undergraduate and graduate students at Davidson, Duquesne, and the University of Georgia researched and wrote biographies of figures in avant-garde circles in New York, Florence, and Paris connected to Loy. Students entered metadata about these figures into a spreadsheet, which Emily McGinn and Caleb Crumley at UGA’s Digital Humanities Lab used to generate a visualization of Loy’s social and artistic network in Florence, New York, and Paris (read our blogpost about this collaboration).

[Click on map to enlarge]

This network is a visualization of Mina Loy and the connections she made with other writers and artists, both personally and through her work. Each node (circle) represents a person connected to Loy. Each edge (line) between the nodes is colored according to the type of connection the person had with Loy (see legend).

You may notice that some nodes are sized differently than others. Their size is based on their betweenness centrality, which means that a node with a greater betweenness centrality is a node that serves as an essential connection between other parts of the graph. Without this connection the graph would be disjointed and disconnected. The bigger the node, the more clusters the node connects.

Mina Loy is the largest node since she connects the majority of other clusters. Her connections make her central to the graph as a whole. If we were to remove her from this network, there would be a number of disconnected clusters. Therefore, the size of Mina Loy’s node does not not directly correlate with the number of edges, but rather the number of clusters that she connects. If a node with only one edge, a leaf node, were to be removed, it would have little to no effect on the layout since it does not connect any clusters together. You can read a more detailed explanation of network graphs at UGA’s DigiLab.

Click on the map to view a larger size.

For more on Loy’s activities, writing, and art in Italy, see the following chapters in Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers:

• Linda A. Kinnahan, “Loy’s Italian Baedeker: Mapping a Feminist En Dehors Garde“
• Suzanne W. Churchill, “Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays“

Click on the map to view a larger size.

For more on Loy’s Paris years, see the following chapter in Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers:

• Susan Rosenbaum, “Surreal Scene: Paris, 1923-1936″