=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3110/paper10
|storemode=property
|title=Identifying Lesser-Known Actors of the ‘Stuttgart School’: An
Event-Oriented Approach to Historical Network Research
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3110/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-3110
|authors=Claus-Michael Schlesinger
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/graph/Schlesinger20
}}
==Identifying Lesser-Known Actors of the ‘Stuttgart School’: An
Event-Oriented Approach to Historical Network Research==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3110/paper10.pdf
Identifying Lesser-Known Actors of the
‘Stuttgart School’: An Event-Oriented
Approach to Historical Network
Research
Claus-Michael Schlesinger
University of Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany
Abstract
The term ‘Stuttgart School’ has been used to describe local develop-
ments in the areas of concrete poetry, information aesthetics, and com-
putational generative art and poetry. The article proposes to describe
the larger Stuttgart School Network, on a local level, as being comprised
of these intertwined areas. Following approaches in the history of
knowledge that focus on collectives rather than single individuals, the
Stuttgart School is modeled as a network of persons, institutions, pub-
lications, and events. Network data was extracted from a corpus of 23
texts consisting of material from the University of Stuttgart Archive’s
collection of press articles pertaining to Max Bense, along with addi-
tional historical and autobiographical accounts. An event-oriented ap-
proach was employed for the reconstruction of a local historical net-
work through extraction, visualization, and contextualized interpret-
ation. The outcome of the study regarding extracted network data
should be seen as preliminary; however, together with the conceptual
and methodological framework presented here, the extracted data can
provide the basis for a more detailed and extensive reconstruction of
the Stuttgart School Network.
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In: Tara Andrews, Franziska Diehr, Thomas Efer, Andreas Kuczera and Joris van Zun-
dert (eds.): Graph Technologies in the Humanities - Proceedings 2020, published at
http://ceur-ws.org
This long paper is based on research presented at “Graph Technologies in the Humanities
2019” (January 18-19, Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, Germany).
193
1 Art and Science in Practice
The following article presents the results of exploratory historical network
research on what has been called the ‘Stuttgart School’ – a constellation of
persons, events, institutions, and scientific as well as artistic activities and
discourse that emerged in three intertwined areas between the late 1950s and
the early 70s: concrete poetry, information aesthetics, and computational
generative art and literature. Research on the Stuttgart School often focuses
on one or two of these fields and a small set of protagonists. The main goal of
this exploratory empirical study is therefore to build a preliminary network
of lesser-known actors of the Stuttgart School in order to identify potential
clusters formed by persons, institutions, events, and key publications.
This case study is part of a larger effort to better understand the history of
information aesthetics and computational generative art and literature. The
focus on Stuttgart is based on the assumption that in this case, the local dy-
namics played an important role in the establishment of a network of prot-
agonists and institutions where individual and, more importantly, collect-
ive development of scientific and artistic thought and practices could take
place (Fleck, 1980). Such a history of knowledge is less interested in the sin-
gular achievements of prominent individuals as in the dynamics that lead
to developments like the foundation of information aesthetics and the col-
lectives that feed into these developments through their practices. Identify-
ing lesser-known actors allows for a historical reconstruction of the Stuttgart
School Network which takes into account the conditions for the generation
of knowledge within a specific historical constellation of material practices,
intellectual endeavors, and social activities.
The approach used in this study has partly been derived from Ludwik
Fleck’s concepts of thought collectives and thought styles, which emerge
through specific productive practices in specific material environments
(Fleck, 1980, pp. 54-55). In his studies on the nature of scientific research,
Fleck argues that knowledge is not the result of individual genius or labor,
but rather an effect of collective thought and practices, as in the case of a
laboratory. These collectives and their interactions lead to what Fleck calls
thought styles: a certain way of seeing, understanding, describing, and acting
on things in an epistemological sense.
If we apply Fleck’s ideas to the case at hand, the contributions of lesser-
known actors must be considered crucial for the development of the thought
collectives of the Stuttgart School and their concomitant thought styles. By
describing certain actors as ‘lesser-known,’ it is acknowledged that most of
these individuals and their work have been named in historical research and
accounts, or in publications that circulated at the time. The goal of recon-
194
structing the Stuttgart School Network from this perspective is therefore not
to find individuals that might have been forgotten, but to reconstruct the net-
work as interconnected thought collectives or constellations. The notion of
constellation applied here is derived from the historical modeling of philo-
sophical knowledge production (Mulsow, 2005), where it is understood as
a dense context comprising a well-defined set of persons and elements of dis-
course (ideas, theories, and material documents). Martin Mulsow differenti-
ates between three levels of relationships: a micro level, where constellations
are located; a meso level with larger organizational structures like journals or
universities; and a macro level with an even larger scope. Constellations, he
writes, rely heavily on oral communication and social interactions in formal
and informal settings such as reading groups or university seminars, a cri-
terion that applies perfectly to the Aesthetic Colloquium at the Technical
University of Stuttgart led by Max Bense.
The Stuttgart School Network encompasses both the micro and the meso
level, as it seeks to map dense connections of subgroups or clusters as well as
the larger context or superstructures of these groups. Due to its focus on
social connections, the data model developed in this study does not contain
any elements of discursive enunciation like ideas or theories. The decision
not to concentrate on a single constellation exclusively, like the group that
evolved around Bense’s Aesthetic Colloquium, is based on the notion that
research on the Stuttgart School has often focused on a small set of protagon-
ists, especially Max Bense himself, or on smaller groups belonging to one of
the larger fields of concrete poetry, information aesthetics, or computational
generative art and literature (Barbara Büscher, 2004).
2 The Stuttgart School
2.1 Conceptualizations in Historical and Autobiographical Accounts
The term ‘Stuttgart School’ has been applied to phenomena in the fields of
concrete poetry, information aesthetics, and computational generative liter-
ature and art with a variety of meanings by scholars of cultural, literary, and
art history.1 According to Jörg-Rössler (2006), the term itself was coined by
the author Manfred Esser at a conference of the French Tel Quel group in ref-
erence to the artists and researchers in Stuttgart connected to Max Bense at
the time, and subsequently picked up in French and German news reports.
Jörg-Rössler (2006) explicitly names concrete poetry, information aesthet-
ics, and computational generative literature (not art) as the themes around
which the Stuttgart School revolved.
1
There is also a Stuttgart School of architecture and a Stuttgart School of documentary
film making, both of which have no direct connection to the present study (Köhler, 1996).
195
Reinhard Döhl, in a historical and autobiographical account of the Stut-
tgart School, proposes to distinguish between the Stuttgart School proper,
by which he means the circle of researchers working on information aes-
thetics at the university, and the Stuttgart Group, which encompassed the
broader group of authors and artists whose texts were published in the liter-
ary magazine Augenblick and the series edition rot, and whose work was ex-
hibited in the University of Stuttgart’s Studiengalerie, which was curated by
Max Bense and Helmut Röttgen (Döhl, 1997). It is notable that Döhl was
himself part of the history he describes, both in his capacity as a professor
of literary studies at the University of Stuttgart and as an author of concrete
poetry.
In her recent study on Max Bense’s relationship to Brazil and Brazilian ex-
perimental poetry, Jasmin Wrobel describes a group of concrete poetry au-
thors located in or near Stuttgart, namely Helmut Heißenbüttel, Reinhard
Döhl, and Franz Mon, as the Stuttgart School, focusing on local protagon-
ists of concrete poetry in her usage of the term (Wrobel, 2019, p. 293).
Meanwhile, in his in-depth study on the beginnings of computational gen-
erative art in Stuttgart, Christoph Klütsch uses the term ‘Stuttgart School’ to
refer to a group of artists and scientists whose work on information aesthetics
at the University of Stuttgart transcended the boundary between art and sci-
ence (Klütsch, 2012). In the cases of Frieder Nake and Georg Nees, who ex-
perimented with computational methods and hardware to produce art, and
Theo Lutz, who employed computational methods for poetic natural lan-
guage generation, artistic production and scientific research were very much
intertwined. The same is true for Max Bense, to whom all these individu-
als had strong ties. His interest in textual theory and text statistics found
expression in an experimental radio play titled TerryJo. Here, Bense and
his co-author Ludwig Harig, possibly supported by mathematician Siegfried
Maser, a Ph.D. candidate at Bense’s department, used statistical methods de-
scribed by Claude Shannon to generate text with different levels of statist-
ical order, thus recreating Shannon’s approach in that they treated language
as signal processing or communication in a cybernetic sense (Bense, 1998,
2000; Bense and Harig, 2000; Shannon, 2003). The use of analytical meth-
ods for the generation of works of art was conceptualized by Bense as generat-
ive art, with a strong focus on the mathematical and thus rational conditions
of this specific kind of artistic production (Bense, 2004).
All these examples have one thing in common, namely that the term ‘Stut-
tgart School’ is used to describe a more or less specific group of persons that
evolves around certain institutions and events, and that can be tied either
to concrete poetry, information aesthetics, or computational generative art
196
and literature. Regarding the interconnection between these three different
fields and the groups or constellations of actors, events, institutions, and
practices involved, it can be observed that most research acknowledges the
connection of at least two of these fields, with the early history of computa-
tional generative art being linked to research in information aesthetics, and
the textual theory of information aesthetics to the formalist poetics of con-
crete poetry. This means that the data model for the Stuttgart School Net-
work differs from the constellations that have been described as the Stuttgart
School or Stuttgart Group in that it must be able to integrate the various con-
stellations embedded in the broader Stuttgart School context. Topologically
speaking, all constellations are part of the network, and should become vis-
ible as specific clusters. (Provided, of course, that the network is based on
enough empirical data and that the clustering of the network actually reflects
these constellations.)
When preliminary definitions of specific constellations or clusters in the
Stuttgart School Network mature into concrete modeling decisions, broader
methodological questions about heuristics and iterative adaptations arise,
which go beyond the scope of this article. Methodologically speaking, the
data model being used here was developed through heuristic abstractions
from historical accounts. At the same time, the outcome of the modeled em-
pirical data has itself informed adaptations of the model and can be expected
to inform further historical research, as clusterings on the micro and meso
level do not mirror heuristic assumptions, but rather introduce new connec-
tions and sometimes entirely different elements. This iterative development
is part of an exploratory strategy: rather than providing a final picture, the
network can be considered as an instrument for the identification of lesser-
known actors and for further exploration of the histories of information aes-
thetics, computational generative art and literature, and concrete poetry.
2.2 Localization and Time Frame
Research on the Stuttgart School suggests that the network has a strong local
component in that it appears to be tied to a specific and fairly limited geo-
graphic area. At the same time, protagonists of the Stuttgart School had
a large number of interregional and international connections, regarding
either scientific research and art: the Studiengalerie, organized and curated
by Max Bense and Herwarth Röttgen, saw several exhibitions that featured
the work of international artists (Thomas, 2019); the journal Grundlagen-
studien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft had editors located outside
of Stuttgart; and the list of authors who published in the magazine Augen-
blick echoed the manifold relationships of the Stuttgart School beyond the
197
confines of the city and its immediate surroundings.2
By focusing on persons, institutions, and events located in Stuttgart, we
hope to reconstruct the social ties that were rooted in regular and sustained
cultural practices, particularly academic and art events. While most institu-
tions, events, and protagonists of the Stuttgart School Network were based
in Stuttgart, some of them moved on to other places, which, at the end of the
period described here, was one of the reasons for the dissolution of the net-
work. That being said, we recognize that formative events for the Stuttgart
School Network, such as the “Morsbroicher Kunsttage” in 1961 and the
“New Tendencies” exhibitions that took place in Zagreb between 1961 and
1973, occurred outside of Stuttgart and its immediate surroundings (Rosen,
2011). Important events such as these were transcribed to our extracted data-
set if they were named in the corpus as an event according to our definition.
The early work on information aesthetics that was carried out at the Uni-
versity of Stuttgart (Bense, 1960), the experiment in generative literature
conducted by Theo Lutz under the title Stochastic Texts Lutz (1959), and
the works of concrete poetry by various authors based in and around the
city (Gomringer, 2009), can all serve as indicators for the emergence of the
Stuttgart School Network in the late 1950s. There is, however, no clear
marker of its end – the Stuttgart School Network faded away as protagon-
ists left the city and theoretical and artistic interests changed. For example,
in 1968, Frieder Nake, a key figure of computational generative art in Stut-
tgart, moved to Toronto. In his substantial account of the intellectual and
aesthetic history of the Stuttgart School published in 1974, Nake describes
the dissolution of important constellations in the first years of the 1970s
(Nake, 1974), as Max Bense shifted his interests away from information the-
ory and computing, and focused on semiotics instead. Rul Gunzenhäuser,
meanwhile, left poetic natural language generation behind and concentrated
on establishing computer science as an academic discipline in its own right at
the University of Stuttgart (Bernhart, 2019), and Theo Lutz started working
full-time in the computer industry.
2.3 Constellations
In 1959, advised by Rul Gunzenhäuser and informed by Max Bense’s re-
search on information aesthetics, Theo Lutz conceived of a computational
text generator and generated about 50 short texts on the mainframe com-
puter Zuse Z22 at the University of Stuttgart’s new computing center, to
which his role as an engineer gave him access (Lutz, 1959). At the same time,
2
The network associated with these publications has yet to be reconstructed and was
not part of the exploratory study described here.
198
he participated, together with Gunzenhäuser, in the Aesthetic Colloquium
organized by Bense. The project of creating poetic Stochastic Texts brought
together computer science, computational text studies or text statistics, and
poetic production. In order to randomly pick words from a list, random
numbers had to be produced, and Lutz developed his own pseudo-random
number generator for the large mainframe. The generation of natural lan-
guage mirrored certain problems of text statistics Bense was working on at
the time based on Claude Shannon’s propositions for the stochastic model-
ing of language (Shannon, 2003; Bense, 2000). Finally, the Stochastic Texts
used vocabulary derived from the novel The Castle by Franz Kafka, simultan-
eously reproducing the uncanny in Kafka and producing the uncanny in the
outcome of computational poetic natural language generation.
Conceptualizing, printing, processing, and publishing the Stochastic Texts
can be described as a series of events that connects different actors (in this
case Theo Lutz, Rul Gunzenhäuser, and Max Bense, as well as Elisabeth
Walther and other editors of the magazine Augenblick), and also different
fields of activity, namely computer science (which, at the time, was still called
mathematics), information aesthetics, and literature.
Another exemplary constellation is Georg Nees’s presentation of his early
computationally generated art works at the Aesthetic Colloquium, a regu-
lar event attended by members of the University of Stuttgart (students and
staff) and, sometimes, by artists and authors. For the presentation of the art
works, Max Bense, who organized the session, invited Stuttgart-based artists,
and there were always graduate and doctoral students in attendance. The
Aesthetic Colloquium was a key event for presenting, testing, and discussing
research in information aesthetics and, specifically at this event, generative
art. The corpus put together for the empirical study contains two autobio-
graphical descriptions of the event, one by Nees, the presenting artist, and
one by Marion Röttgen, a graduate student at the University of Stuttgart at
the time (Nees, 2005). Both accounts were written down or told to inter-
viewers many years after the fact.
It is not a coincidence that both Lutz and Nees are men: women are under-
represented in the network. This is at least partly due to the fact that women
in general were underrepresented in academia during the period in question
as a result of academic and societal power structures. Another reason is the
underrepresentation of women and their work in historical accounts and
in the history of knowledge, and thus in the network data extracted from
these accounts. In our interview, Marion Röttgen described the sessions
of the Aesthetic Colloquium as partly collaborative work on the statistical
analysis of art, including discussions about how to model certain aspects of
199
the works. Students (men and women) took part in these discussions and
thus shaped the abiding discourse. On the level of the academic staff at the
University of Stuttgart, Waltraud Reichert and Elisabeth Walther published
substantial work on information aesthetics. Walther also played an import-
ant role as organizer and editor of the key journals Augenblick and Grundla-
genstudien, and later became a professor at the University of Stuttgart. She
archived, edited, and published many of the works of Max Bense, whom she
married in 1988. Her significant contribution to the Stuttgart School Net-
work through her research and editorial work has long been underestimated
– at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, some of her papers are still
sorted under the name of Max Bense. Reichert, on the other hand, worked
on cybernetic drama analytics, publishing several essays and her doctoral dis-
sertation on the topic (Reichert, 1965). Her work has recently been cited in
the context of the new approaches to computational drama analytics that are
being developed in the digital humanities (Trilcke, 2013). Both researchers
and their connections, however, are not adequately represented in the net-
work reconstructed in this case study, as 1) the corpus for this case study is
still too small and needs to be extended (see 3.6), and 2) the work of both
Walther and Reichert has only recently attracted academic attention.
Figure 1: Stuttgart School Network
200
The network visualization (Figure 1) contains only nodes with at least
one connection (degree greater than zero). Nodes represent tokens of either
of the four classes used (‘person,’ ‘event,’ ‘institution,’ ‘publication’), while
edges represent any type of connection as defined in the model. Edges are
weighted according to the overall connection count. (There is, for example,
more than one connection between Max Bense and Waltraud Reichert in the
dataset.) Several very small unconnected subnetworks were omitted from
the graph. Clusters (colored) were computed based on modularity (with
edge weights and resolution value 2).3 The network shows four distinct
clusters: the green cluster contains the group centered around the magazine
Augenblick and several protagonists of the concrete poetry movement loc-
ated in or near Stuttgart at the time; the red cluster is centered on the ‘Stut-
tgart Group’ as defined by Reinhard Döhl (Döhl himself and Manfred Es-
ser are part of this group); the grey cluster, the smallest cluster in the net-
work, carries the label “Ästhetisches Colloquium” (Aesthetic Colloquium,
see above); and the blue cluster represents Max Bense and the doctoral can-
didates he advised based on the sizable list of doctoral dissertations assembled
by Elisabeth Walther.
3 Empirical Case Study
3.1 Where People Meet
The data model for the empirical study consists of four types of entities: per-
sons (or actors), institutions, events, and publications such as the magazine
Augenblick that brought together a range of different actors from the net-
work. The network represents social contacts, which are defined rather
broadly and range from documented collaboration to participation in the
same event. Events are defined as singular events, for example the first ex-
hibition of computer-generated art at the Studiengalerie or the presentation
of Nees’s artworks at the Aesthetic Colloquium. Institutions range from the
fairly stable and permanent, like the University of Stuttgart, to the more eph-
emeral, like the Aesthetic Colloquium, which could be conceptualized as a
series of events, but has instead been inserted into the institutions category
as it was identified as an important regular institutional series of events in
the corpus. The most important institutions are the locations where regular
meetings, discussions, or exhibitions took place, such as the Studiengalerie
of the University of Stuttgart, the Aesthetic Colloquium, and the bookstore
3
Additional research data (corpus bibliography, extracted network data, conver-
sion script for Gephi ingestion, data model description) is available via Zenodo, DOI:
10.5281/zenodo.4908840. As this is an ongoing project, research data in the repository
will be updated from time to time. The version pertaining to this essay is Version 0.9.
201
Niedlich – a hub for experimental literature and concrete poetry, which also
hosted the first public exhibition of computer-generated artwork by Georg
Nees and Frieder Nake. Finally, the ‘publications’ category contains mainly
three elements: the magazine Augenblick, the book series edition rot, and the
research journal Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft.
As it was beyond the scope of this exploratory study to fully encode the struc-
tural information that can be found in this category (such as co-authorship),
the network does not contain any of the information that could have been
extracted from the respective items.
When examined together, these elements combine into a medium-level
multimodal historical network that provides an overview of the various
groups or clusters, while serving as a useful basis for more microscopic ques-
tions regarding specific connections.
3.2 Corpus
The corpus used for the case study consists of 23 texts that can be categorized
as the University of Stuttgart Archive’s collection of newspaper articles re-
lated to Max Bense, autobiographical accounts of Stuttgart School protagon-
ists, and historical research articles. The archive of the University of Stuttgart
generously shared their collection of press articles published between 1969
and 2003 pertaining to Max Bense during and after his tenure as professor at
the University of Stuttgart (1950–1978). A list of Ph.D. dissertations super-
vised by Bense, put together by Elisabeth Walther, is also part of the archive’s
Bense collection. This document plays a special role in the reconstructed net-
work due to the large number of persons and connections it contains. In ad-
dition to this material, the corpus includes an autobiographical account by
Georg Nees and an interview with Marion Röttgen which was conducted in
2018. Furthermore, two texts by Reinhard Döhl were added, which could
be described as historical accounts containing autobiographical elements –
as a professor of literary studies and an author who collaborated closely with
Max Bense in both of these capacities, Döhl was himself part of the Stuttgart
School Network. The dual role that becomes apparent here is, of course,
far from unusual: as Klausnitzer has noted regarding the history of literary
studies, historical accounts of scientific communities or, on a smaller scale,
thought collectives, are often written by former protagonists. The methodo-
logical implications of this biographical connection between researchers and
their objects of study for the history of science and the history of knowledge
requires further reflection (Klausnitzer, 2001, p. 15).
It should be noted that the corpus is rather small. It may be possible to ex-
pand the reconstructed network by including metadata information extrac-
202
ted from the Stuttgart School publications and by adding more texts to the
corpus. However, the goal of this case study was not to establish a complete
network of the Stuttgart School, but rather to explore how a network-based
approach could help to shed light on the lesser-known actors involved in it.
The small size of the corpus and the types of text it contains imply that
the empirical network data retrieved from the corpus and the network con-
structed from this data need to be contextualized in order to acquire any ex-
planatory value. But while the data and the graph cannot (as of yet) claim to
be representative of the historical Stuttgart School Network, they have nev-
ertheless allowed us to identify directions for further research on individual
entities and clusters (see 3.6).
3.3 Data Collection and Processing
All texts of the corpus were digitized (PDF) and bibliographical data was
stored in a bibliographical database in order to ensure access for everyone in-
volved in encoding the data. Students taking part in a seminar on the broader
cultural history of the Stuttgart School co-constructed and learned the data
model and processed texts according to the encoding instructions. Network
data extracted from the texts was collected in a collaborative spreadsheet and
then converted to a format suitable for the network visualization software
Gephi4 using a Python script (Figure 2).5
Figure 2: Dataflow
Information extraction was done manually using detailed encoding in-
structions with definitions and examples for each type of entity and for each
type of relation. Encoding instructions were adapted in an iterative fashion
during an initial modeling phase. Adaptations mostly pertained to the dif-
ferentiation of properties, and to reductions where expected properties did
not exist in the corpus. Information extraction yielded 135 persons or act-
ors, 15 institutions, eight of which were once or are still located in Stuttgart,
and 16 events that occurred in the time frame between 1964 and 1970. (The
three key publications named above were set from the beginning for heur-
istic reasons.)
4
https://gephi.org/
5
https://github.com/esthet1cs/nws_konverter
203
3.4 Data Model
In order to identify lesser-known actors of the Stuttgart School, the network
is focused on persons with additional attention being paid to events, insti-
tutions, and publications. The basic structure of the model follows the as-
sumption that thought collectives and their larger network are built through
interactions enabled by events and institutions, while participation in the
three publications central to the Stuttgart School Network signifies particip-
ation in debates and discourse (Stichweh, 1994). The main categories in this
model have successfully been used by database or knowledge base projects
looking to map or describe similar movements in art, culture, and the his-
tory of knowledge, for example the compArt database Digital Art (daDA)
conceptualized, built, and run by Frieder Nake and his team,6 and the know-
ledge base Monoskop.7
Idiosyncratic modeling – constructing a model that will be compatible
neither with other models in the same area nor with existing standards in
order to answer a specific research question – poses problems with regards
to data re-use and interoperability. One main area of interest for histor-
ical research on the Stuttgart School Network is the early phase of digital
art. The compArt database contains information about protagonists, insti-
tutions, events, publications, and artworks from this early phase (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Nodes and relations. Entities of the type ‘person’ and ‘publication’ may
refer to other entities of the same type.
However, using both datasets – Stuttgart School Network and compArt
– would require a mapping of the two data models, which in turn creates
a risk of semantic mismatching. It is noteworthy in this context that the
Data for History Consortium is currently working on extensions to CIDOC
6
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/
7
https://monoskop.org
204
CRM, the Conceptual Reference Model of the CIDOC initiative (Beretta
et al., 2019; Beretta and Alamercery, 2020). As an object-oriented onto-
logy that has been developed to accord with the needs of institutions in the
cultural heritage sector, CIDOC CRM is highly extensible and several spe-
cialized extensions exist.8 One notable extension for application in the his-
tory of knowledge is the Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences
(SDHSS) CIDOC CRM top-level extension, as it provides domain-specific
classes and properties extending CIDOC CRM core classes like the Event
class, e.g. for modeling historical social events.9
While the issues of extending models from one domain to others and of
searching for ontological abstractions that can serve as points of reference
for multiple domains or types of networks cannot be discussed here on a the-
oretical level, they had to be addressed in practice with regard to the multi-
modal approach of this case study: How far should we stretch the multi in
multi-modal? Where do we stop? Should we analyze citation networks and
add them as an additional layer? Should we try to extract network informa-
tion from all publications that come up in our corpus texts? In our case, the
reply to the latter two questions was “no” – citation networks are not inter-
personal social networks, and not every magazine or journal is a key factor in
the differentiation of disciplines, scientific communities, or thought collect-
ives like the ones that make up the Stuttgart School Network. Only some
publications function as hubs for a specific scientific community. For the
Stuttgart School Network, earlier research has identified the relevant public-
ations, and the network data extracted from the corpus did not suggest other
publications of special importance, although more data is needed to verify
this conclusively.
3.5 Observations
The Stuttgart School Network as visualized in this study consists of 210
nodes. 138 nodes are connected to other nodes, with 7 nodes forming small
subnetworks that are not connected to the main network, which consists of
131 interconnected nodes. About 70 persons in the network were extracted
from the list of dissertations supervised by Max Bense. Only some of these
have a network degree greater than one. However, through verification of
academic participation, e.g. in the Aesthetic Colloquium, more interconnec-
8
See the list of compatible models on the CIDOC CRM website: CIDOC CRM, Com-
patible Models & Collaborations, http://www.cidoc-crm.org/collaborations.
9
The SDHSS ontology has been published via the Ontome ontology platform: Se-
mantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences (SDHSS) CIDOC CRM Top-Level Exten-
sion, https://ontome.net/ns/sdhss-top-level/, Version date 2021-04-21. See also (Beretta and
Alamercery, 2020)
205
tions are likely to be found. In total, the number of interconnected nodes
was larger than expected based on existing research on the Stuttgart School.
The most connected and central node of the network is the Max Bense
node. This was to be expected, as a substantial part of the corpus consists
of the University of Stuttgart Archive’s collection of press articles and uni-
versity documents pertaining to Bense and his work. Conversely, in some
cases, the degree and centrality measure was lower than could be assumed
from contextual information – the Waltraud Reichert node, for example, is
only connected to the Max Bense node, although Reichert was a co-author
and author of multiple scientific publications that had a notable impact. A
higher degree and a more central position was also expected for the Elisabeth
Walther node due to her editorial role for key publications of the Stuttgart
School such as Augenblick and the works of Max Bense.
When examining the amount of connections extracted from the docu-
ments, it was found that some documents contained a substantially higher
amount of data compared to others, particularly the list of dissertations.
Other documents with a high data yield were historical or autobiographical
accounts citing persons, places, and events, for example those by Reinhard
Döhl. Given the small size of the corpus available for the exploratory study,
the influence of these data-rich documents on the network was considerable.
3.6 Insights and Next Steps
Visibility: the network contains persons and other entities that might other-
wise be overlooked. Although the network structure itself may not put these
entities in the foreground, it helps to bring them into focus as part of spe-
cific clusters. Since the network reflects a corpus that is itself influenced by
historical power structures, positions and measures of certain entities must
be interpreted with care. Regarding the Stuttgart School Network, this is es-
pecially true for women, whose organizing role (Elisabeth Walther) and sci-
entific contributions (Elisabeth Walther and Waltraud Reichert) have only
recently received more attention from historians and literary scholars (Al-
brecht et al., 2019, p. 7).
Contextualization: research on the Stuttgart School or Stuttgart Group
often focuses on certain fields, groups, or even individuals. The reconstruc-
tion of the Stuttgart School Network comprising persons, events, institu-
tions, and specific publications associated with information aesthetics, com-
putational generative art and literature, or concrete poetry, provides a more
accurate picture of the extent of the historical network and allows the con-
textualization of specific subgroups or clusters within that network, like the
concrete poetry group to which Reinhard Döhl belonged, or the group of
206
artists and researchers in information aesthetics that gathered around Max
Bense. Thus, the present study provides both an overview of the network
and detailed views of local historical constellations comprising persons, in-
stitutions, events, and publications at the nexus of aesthetics and poetics on
the one hand, and cybernetics and information theory on the other.
As the case study has shown, more documents will need to be added to the
corpus in order to produce more robust results. Strategies to extend the cor-
pus and retrieve more empirical data in the future include the addition of all
issues of the key publications determined through existing research, and the
identification of more key events in written historical accounts and direct in-
terviews with former protagonists of the Stuttgart School Network. Making
the data available to researchers working in the fields of cultural history and
the history of knowledge might lead to further interest in the subject and
thus to further information regarding the network. In order to enable other
researchers to re-use the network data and add more data points, the model
will have to be refined and reformulated in relation to a reference model like
CIDOC CRM.
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