Performer communities within a hyperconnected company network

This lightning talk presents our approach to identifying and representing what constitutes movement communities in the project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project uses the case study of Dunham’s company, in which almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers performed across the world for thirty years. The challenge this case poses is how to discover sub-communities among a hyperconnected community of artists who all worked together over time. Based on the concept of the check-in, which explicitly states the presence of performers on a specific date and location, we created a flow diagram and a community network that visualize the performers’ individual paths through this hyperconnected network as well as the temporal sub-communities that these form. We analyzed the hyperconnectivity phenomenon from these two perspectives, in an effort to understand the complexity of this highly interconnected network.