LyrricJ/women-in-dance-data

Datasets and visualizations of women in dance data collections, interview transcripts, dancer profiles, and mission work towards preserving the cultural heritage of women of the African Diaspora through digital archive and storytelling. # Women In Dance Data Repository This repository is for Women in Dance, a course instructed by Professor Lyrric Jackson for the Spelman College Dance Performance and Choreography Department. This repository holds course datasets and visualizations of women in dance data collections, interview transcripts, dancer profiles, and mission work towards preserving the cultural heritage of women of the African Diaspora through digital archive and storytelling. Faculty and student work combine to create a digital archive for women in dance, living and passed. ### Lecture 4: Thursday, September 11, 2025 Coding Motifs: Tools Overview We are exploring how dance motifs—recurring gestures, phrases, or movements that unify choreography—can also be studied through computational tools. Just as choreographers manipulate motifs to create meaning, we can use code to identify, visualize, and analyze them in movement data. Below are three key tools we’ll be using: ## MATLAB What it is: A high-performance computing environment often used in engineering and science. Why we use it in this course: MATLAB helps us take raw data (like CSV files of movement information) and turn them into visualizations that highlight recurring motifs. Examples for our work: * Reading in a dataset of movements. * Plotting gesture frequency or motif sequences. * Building visual graphs that show how motifs repeat, vary, or shift across a piece. ## RStudio What it is: An open-source IDE for the R programming language, widely used in statistics, data visualization, and humanities research. Why we use it in this course: RStudio lets us explore the patterns and significance of motifs by applying statistical tools. Examples for our work: * Charting motif repetitions across time. * Comparing motif use between different choreographers. * Running analyses that connect motif frequency to larger cultural or narrative questions. ## GitHub What it is: A platform for storing, sharing, and collaborating on code. Why w …