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:

Links:

• Read about the Revolutionary Tides exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center.
• Visit the Crowds website as installed at the Revolutionary Tides exhibition.