Future Directions
Current Status
The manifesto project as it is currently stands shows:
- the sheer number of manifestos and related texts generated from the late 19th century to the mid-20th,
- their geographical spread,
- the often densely local, but sometimes international, geographical scope of several major schools,
- and general information about the artistic schools currently int he database.
The manifesto project also provides acces to a searchable database of documents that can be filtered by school, author and year.
What's Next
There are two main ways the database could be made even more expansive, with the eventual goal of contributing to original research:
1) Database Expansion and Refinement
- There are many more manifestos and related texts that could be added to this database. Currently it focuses mostly on the modernist period, which roughly tracks with the interwar years, and can be seen in the explosion of publications on the project's timeline between 1907-1926. The project also includes many works before and after this date, but could be expanded especially in the mid-twentieth century to include other artistic movements that followed the manifesto 'boom' of the early twentieth century.
- It would be also helpful to have a clearer system of categorization between manifesto documents and related texts or samples. The distinction is not always clear, as statements of purpose can be embedded in esssays or exemplified in art, especially in the context of avant-garde modernist movements. For simplicity's sake, currently all documents in the database are listed as manifestos. Rather than making binary total decisions about whether a document 'counts' as a manifesto, I envision that a future version of the database could include a subject tagging systemf or various tropes that recur in the manifesto genre, with certain documents having higher or lower concetrations of these tropes.
2) Subject Tags and Network Analyses
This database could potentially be used to begin to create a large-scale picture of not just the geography and time-scale of manifesto production in the mdoern period, but could also potentially begin a larger scale analysis of the content of the manifestos themselves. In my initial reading of several key primary texts, I began to formulate a draft list of tropes, listed below:
- Direct Address
- Common Enemy
- Concrete Poetry
- Nationalism
- Rejection of the past/tradition
- Use of the first person
- Vision of future
- Explanation of history/need for reform
These tags could revised, potentially expanded, and applied to documents as relevant, allowing the visualization of the prevalence of different themes across time and the intersection between types of content and various historical events.
Another potential category that could be added to the database is 'influence'. The connections between modernist artistic movements are famously convoluted and dense and many schools are explicitly reacting against each other or directly influenced by each other. it would be helpful to find a way to articulate the precedents and descendants of 1) artistic schools in general, and 2) perhaps particular documents. Then, hopefully, a network analysis could be generated showing their relationships.