Project Description:
CROWDS is a collaborative research project that
examines the importance of the crowd in the modern
era. Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 best-seller La
Psychologie des foules — the Psychology of Crowds
— prophesied that "the age we are about to enter will
in truth be the era of crowds." Le Bon's announcement
has often been quoted, but the wide-ranging impact
of human collectivities over the past two centuries
has never been comprehensively examined. This project takes full advantage of the possibilities
inherent in collaborative work and new multimedia
technologies to explore the intersection between a
number of disciplines implicated in this phenomenon:
psychology, photography, literature, painting, cartooning,
film, history, sociology, and more. Research results
currently take the form of an image-intensive website
in which specific sub-areas are developed, and a multimedia
publication under consideration at a major university
press. Current project goals include:
- Completion of the CROWDS multimedia publication. This ambitious, graphically innovative
volume presents several layers of meditation on the phenomenon of collectivities, from the
scholarly to the personal. It consists in a number of essays by international experts including
Allen Guttmann, Susanna Elm, Stefan Jonsson, John Plotz, Christina Poggi, Richard Sennett, and
Charles Tilly, as well as collaboratively produced essays by the CROWDS research team. The
essays are interspersed with personal testimonies from individuals involved in culturally
important crowd moments of the last fifty years and semantic histories of the important terms
relating to this phenomenon in world languages. Finally, the print volume is accompanied by a
searchable digital library of hard-to-find writings on crowds from 1850-1915, and a databank of
images and film clips richly illustrating the crowd phenomenon and its representations in various
media. Publication
Proposal (PDF, 76KB)
- A large-scale exhibition, "Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914-1989",
will examine the key role played by crowds in modern politics and society from World War I to the fall
of the Berlin Wall. It is organized by the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University with the Hoover Institution, the Stanford Humanities Lab, and The Wolfsonian-Florida International University.
- Continued development of the Crowds website. Recently a number of new galleries and semantic
histories of relevant words have been added to the site.
- Launch of new flash website featuring updated galleries, semantic histories and other supplementary
content with layout by Animated Design of Emeryville, California.
The Crowds project is supported in part by a grant
from the Seaver Institute.
Core Personnel:
- Marisa Galvez (Project Manager)
- Jeffrey Schnapp
- Matthew Tiews
- Heather Farkas
Graduate Fellows:
- Andrew Uroskie
- Sebastian DeVivo
Affiliated Researchers:
- Joy Connolly
- Cherise Smith
- Urs Staeheli
- Jobst Welge
Undergraduate Assistants:
- Jason Glick
- Tess Hand-Bender
- Anna Rimoch
- Kevin Systrom
- Matthew Brown
- Dara Weinberg
- Alexandra Sofroniew
Web Development:
- Animated Design: Bill Freais, Andrea Silvestri, Dean Silvestri
- Dennis Schaaf
- Joe Gotelli
Contact:
Marisa Galvez <mgalvez @ stanford.edu>
Links:
|
