We've talked about the Great Utopians collection on this blog before. I've been working on it since my first couple of weeks at JRAAS, and since then I've created a database with all 77 entries, and written an article with Joana Pinela about it, which was published in the latest issue of Via Panoramica.

The paper dealt with the variables of field, gender, geography and chronology within the database, and this led me to create some visualizations that can allow us to see these variables in connection with each other.

Space

When it comes to the geography of our database, Europe (and North America, to a degree) is clearly dominant in the database. Places that have given humanity some of its greatest thinkers - North Africa, the Middle East, China, India - appear to be sparsely populated by utopians, or completely devoid of them. If we take into account the variable of gender into the geography of the Great Utopians, these anomalies become even more pronounced. European and North American women are completely dominant in the database, and women are almost entirely absent in the Global South.

Time

The chronology of the database is also riddled with big gaps. The majority of the people in the database were born in the last 200 years, which in some cases leaves us with millennium-long gaps in the timeline. This is especially apparent in the field of STEM, where we can see a thousand year gap between the birth of Cai Lun - the Chinese inventor of paper - and the birth of Galileo. It's also apparent that some fields are clearly dominant. The prevalence of figures in STEM fields may tell us something about how utopia is thought of. Besides being the "social dreaming" that Lymar Tower Sargent talked about - in which imagined societies address the social ills of reality - it is also composed of those that work to advance humanity's technical abilities and knowledge of the natural world. Besides all of this, the variable of gender is also relevant here: in the chronology of the Great Utopians, we spend almost two millennia without any women showing up, until the birth of social activist Olympe de Gouges.

These visualizations are a testament to the power of the Digital Humanities. A curated use of digital tools will allow us to get insights into the Arts and the Social Sciences that would very difficult to get to in traditional Humanities - or, maybe, impossible.