Circle's Edge

Circle’s Edge is an ongoing project designed to locate, describe, and index letters and manuscripts written and received by heretofore overlooked associates of twentieth century American artists Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Strand. Between roughly 1915 and 1935, these three maintained a close personal and professional relationship fostered by their common concern to develop modern art in the United States. The end goal of the Circle s Edge project is to create a fully searchable database providing access to the comments of people surrounding major figures in early twentieth century photography and painting.

Now in the first stages of development, Circle s Edge is concentrating on the preparation of an index of the manuscripts and letters written by Rebecca “Beck” Salsbury James. After her marriage to Paul Strand in 1922, she developed close relationships with both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe that she maintained after her marriage to Strand ended in 1934.

Beck was both part of their inner circle and at some remove from its primary concerns as it oscillated between New York City and Taos, New Mexico, from 1915 to the mid-1940s. The written records she has left recording her ambiguous relationships to the three principals and observations on the small group dynamics of this tight circle offer an unusual perspective on three important artists who assigned themselves the responsibility for creating a unique American aesthetic in the first half of the twentieth century.

As the database grows, the comments of others around Stieglitz, O’Keeffe and Strand, such as Elizabeth McCausland, Marsden Hartley, and Isabel Gaston, will be added to Beck s observations. The original copies of these documents are preserved in various archives throughout the United States. At present, we are drawing from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

As the database evolves, Circle s Edge will provide links to appropriate finding aids that already exist online for collections at major manuscripts repositories in the United States.

The database design incorporates Oracle’s object-relational features to facilitate the collection and searching of the many variations on terms used in this application. The administrative forms allowing ongoing data entry and modification relating to the documents and people associated with the documents along with the dynamic search web site are designed and built using Active Server Pages (ASP) which link directly to the database.

 

Circle’s Edge

Guided tour

Let’s begin by looking at the "Table of contents" section on the home page; there are six categories to help you use Circle’s Edge to find the information you need.

"Table of contents" selections are:

Tour
First is the Tour button where there are a few sample searches of each type to orient you to how the data is categorized. The remaining five buttons are search choices; you can begin your search from the home page; these five search options and the image icon are repeated in the header box of every search type. You can perform any search from the home page; you can perform any search from each type of search page. Wherever you are you can initiate any type of search.

Most search types provide alphabetical pull down menus from which you select a term. There is also a Variant search option where you can enter a nickname or variant spelling and retrieve the term used in Circle’s Edge. Search results are arranged chronologically and include the number of documents from that year.

Persons
The "Persons" search page has three options. The first two options are useful for searches of individual names. With the first option you select a name from the pull down menu. Search results are arranged chronologically with the number of documents retrieved for that person. For example, a search for Rebecca James will retrieve:

 

The second "Persons" search option gives you a box in which to enter a variant name. For example, type the variant name ‘Little Fella’, and your search will retrieve material by Alfred Stieglitz.
         



 



 

 

These Persons retrieval screens offer two additional categories of information. The first category is a choice to limit your search results by document type. For example, you may limit your retrieval by "letters" or "newspaper clippings".

The second category of information is the Biography button to the right of the person’s name. Selecting this button provides information about: gender, race, birth date, death date, birth place, death place, religion, artistic specialty, occupation, and nationality.
 


 

Close the Biography page and return to the results screen; click on 1920 and on the first letter in the list. The record opens and displays the metadata; note that the Institute Name tells you the name of the institution that holds the original manuscript, the Center for Creative Photography.
 


 

Click on the Center for Creative Photography and a window opens with location and contact information for the Center.
 


 

The third way to search "Persons" data is useful when you want to find groups of people sharing one or more characteristic. For example, find all females born in 1899. The template provides characteristics for your search: artistic specialty, nationality, occupation, race, religion, gender, birth date, birthplace, death date, and death-place.

Years
The next search type is Years, a chronological approach. Circle’s Edge materials cover 1865-1975. Each document in the database has, at a minimum, an estimated year. For example, when you click on ‘1929’ all documents produced in that year sorted chronologically by month appear.
 

Subject
There are two ways to search "Subjects". You can choose one of four types of subject searches: general subjects, personal events, contemporary events, and/or geographic subjects. The second tactic is to combine types of subjects.

Gallery/Businesses
To search for a gallery or business you select the name from an alphabetical list of names. You will retrieve all documents with the gallery/business name sorted by the gallery/business name and sub-sorted by year. To the right of the gallery/business name is a button providing some background information and location detail. For example, here is the data on Stieglitz’s gallery, 291.

Locations
The "Locations" search is the last menu choice. This search type retrieves settings and/or locations from which letters were written and at which letters were received. This category of information is the least populated at this time. For example, searching for a letter written from Chateau Lake Louise in Banff Canada will return four letters written in 1920.

Database
This Internet application contains a database holding key information allowing historians to easily search for data relating to the historical documents. The database design incorporates Oracle’s object-relational features to facilitate the collection and searching of the many variations on terms used in this application. The administrative forms allowing ongoing data entry and modification relating to the documents and people associated with the documents along with the dynamic search web site are designed and built using Active Server Pages (ASP) which link directly to the database.