The Crowded Page was an Internet-based humanities computing project whose goal was to create data-mining and visualization tools. In most accounts of literary and art history, a work of art or literature is said to be the product of a single creative mind. In an effort to make visible what is often obscured in traditional histories of art and literature, The Crowded Page took advantage of the unique capabilities of the digital medium to foreground the ways in which a complex network of friends, editors, neighbors, lovers, and fellow artists and writers informs the creative process.
The Crowded Page has created a relational database that contains information about discrete creative communities and designed an interface for this database that allowed researchers to discover and visualize the different kinds of connections that link the members of communities together. The visualization and discovery tools on The Crowded Page allowed students and scholars alike to understand the nature of authorship in a truly revolutionary way.
In the initial stage of the project, we created a "proof of concept" webpage that provided a glimpse into the kind of powerful interaction with the data that we imagine in the fully formed site. This site documents the interface and provides data from that initial site. We have two major datasets represented: the artist community centered around Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York, between 1910-1920, and the community that gathered around Charles Pfaff's beer cellar in lower Manhattan in the mid-nineteenth century. Of these two, the Pfaff's dataset, drawn from Whitley's The Vault at Pfaff's is more complete. The Greenwich Village dataset, though reasonable rich with hundreds of people, is not complete enough at this time for one to use it to do actual research on this community. Both of these datasets are avalable in the mysql database on our download page.