Founded in 1909 and based in Italy, Futurism was Europe’s first avant-garde movement. While much research has been carried out about the movement’s manifestations in specific locales, a pan-Italian examination of its over time and space has been lacking. This paper will present the preliminary findings of a study of Futurism in Italy, which utilizes digital humanities tools, specifically historical geographic information systems (HGIS), to quantitatively investigate the development of the movement during its 35-year lifespan (1909-1944). The paper will present an analysis of Futurist cultural activity (exhibitions, publishing, and theatre) in Italy, highlighting the interactions between its shifting centers and peripheries. The data will be sourced from letters, periodicals and Futurist ephemera. Received ideas about the nature of the movement’s development will be interrogated empirically, and the paper will seek to answer questions such as: In what ways did Futurist activity spread around Italy? How did the central hierarchy communicate with peripheral groups? This is the first time HGIS has been applied to the study of the avant-garde and Futurism. We will start with the case study of Futurism to review the nature and type of historical data that can be successfully handled and represented by HGIS. From a practical perspective, we will discuss the tools that we adopted for the task (e.g. QGIS and R), pointing out their advantages and limitations.
Figure 1: Publications of Futurist magazines (1909-1944)
Figure 2: Social network of Futurism correspondence (455 letters in period 1914-1918)
Reference: Ballatore, A. & Daly, S. (2016) The avant-garde in space and time: Centers and peripheries of Italian Futurism, Spatial Humanities Conference, 14-15 Sept 2016, Lancaster, United Kingdom. Source
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 