This is the opening essay in the volume Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890-1939. Towards a Rewriting of Cultural History, gathering the first results of a nationally relevant research project co-financed by MIUR (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica, 1999 and 2002), which I directed, and that involved 38 researchers from six participating universities. The project included the creation of a database and an online website. In the essay I discuss the motivations and historical and critical grounds of the project, as well as the theoretical and methodological innovations brought about by the need to construct a digital architecture capable not only of representing a number of women and cultural products but of rendering the complexity of cultural dynamics in the period under scrutiny. Since the aim of the whole project was to contribute to a re-reading of turn-of-the century cultural history by stressing connections and interrelations between Europe and America and between different fields of theory and practice, in the universes of aesthetic creation as well as in political engagement, economics and social activism, I contributed the theoretical frame of the whole project, and synthetically defined it “the relational model of the cultural sphere as a complex system”. The relational model is at the core of my essay, with a first introductory part and a second part that illustrates it.
Networking Women: A Research Project and a Relational Model of the Cultural Sphere
CAMBONI, Marina
2004-01-01
Abstract
This is the opening essay in the volume Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890-1939. Towards a Rewriting of Cultural History, gathering the first results of a nationally relevant research project co-financed by MIUR (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica, 1999 and 2002), which I directed, and that involved 38 researchers from six participating universities. The project included the creation of a database and an online website. In the essay I discuss the motivations and historical and critical grounds of the project, as well as the theoretical and methodological innovations brought about by the need to construct a digital architecture capable not only of representing a number of women and cultural products but of rendering the complexity of cultural dynamics in the period under scrutiny. Since the aim of the whole project was to contribute to a re-reading of turn-of-the century cultural history by stressing connections and interrelations between Europe and America and between different fields of theory and practice, in the universes of aesthetic creation as well as in political engagement, economics and social activism, I contributed the theoretical frame of the whole project, and synthetically defined it “the relational model of the cultural sphere as a complex system”. The relational model is at the core of my essay, with a first introductory part and a second part that illustrates it.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
