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• 1 media/Bouquet_images - 0009 - cropped.jpg media/Bouquet_images - 0009 - cropped.jpg 2019-03-02T03:06:39-08:00 Personnages and Pathways 40 plain 2019-05-12T22:07:36-07:00 Charles VI, the guest of honor, never showed up to the grandiose party the town of Ghent organized for him in the Fall of 1717. However, local dignitaries and clergymen found prestige, fame, and a place in history simply by attending what was arguably the political event of 1717 in Ghent. In fact, the careful recording of who was present, at which point and in what place during the celebration, is the core of what the festival book records. Instead of celebrating solely the person for whom the book was written, the town of Ghent, as a collectivity was throwing a party. This figured heavily into this project's analysis of the various personnages found throughout the deluxe engraved memorialization of the event.
  
  The festival book records the names of those who were present and those who were absent at each event as the narrative advances spatially through the town of Ghent. For these reasons, we have tracked both the personnages and pathways that festival book details. While individuals and groups of individuals matter as characters of the story, the festival book meticulously traces the position of attendants in space at each event, their position relative to others, as well as their movement from one venue to the next. By visualizing such social situations, the social standing and political powers at play in early 18th-century Flanders come to light. Furthermore, physical proximity and temporal pacing of the procession illuminates the enactment of power and public performance which took place over the course of three days in 1717 Ghent.  
  
  
  One of the most vivid representations of Charles VI is, in fact, in the frontispiece. Afterwards, his role seems to become less relevant.  

  RELATION
  DE L'INAUGURATION SOLEMNELLE
  DE SA SACREE MAJESTE
  IMPERIALE ET CATHOLIQUE
  CHARLES VI.
  EMPEREUR DES ROMAINS,
  TOUJOURS AUGUSTE,
  ET TROISIEME DU NOM
  ROY DES ESPAGNES,
  COMME
  COMTE DE FLANDRES
  Celebrée à GAND Ville Capitale de la Province,
  le XVIII Octobre 1717.

  
  His role as an Emperor and Earl of Flanders is what brought him to the capital of the province, Ghent. However, as we argue, the presence of lower dignitaries than himself was celebrated instead.  This image depicts and names each person who attended the event in which the king's representative swore his oath, itself written out in the last pages of the book.
  
  
  
  
  Using data gleaned from the text, we were able to discover and track
  1. the names and ranks of those listed in the text;
  2. who was present at each locale;
  3. how they proceeded from one place to the next, and in what numbers.
  
  The network graph below maps out which dignitaries attended which of the events, and which were absent:
  
  
  
  We have also created links from the illustrations in the book to match participants and their locales.
  
  Research results benefit from the following Digital Humanities tools:
  • Recogito, a tool to annotate and tag relevant information on the online version of the text
  • Google Sheets, three spreadsheets to catalog and systematize facts about people, title, and first mentions of presence. Data sheets were also exported and cross-checked with the manually-collected data.
  • Palladio, a tool to visualize the first mentions of each person and which people attended which event.
  
  Further work could include the popularity of each event to show the flow of the procession from one locale to the next, by using blueflow.map. In addition to that, we could geo-rectify a historical map of Ghent to pinpoint locales in the party (as shown in the Florence project linked here https://decima-map.net). One longer project might wish to consider the differences in ranking and hierarchy among the various titles ascribed to various Belgian/Flemish nobles; in such sense, we believe that one repository to check is the Mormons Latter Day Saints' genealogy website,
  and the website https://search.ancestry.com/Places/Europe/Belgium/Default.aspx
  
  
   
• 1 2019-05-12T22:25:22-07:00 Personnages and Pathways 2 12 plain 846749 2019-05-13T12:00:28-07:00 This image records the names of each person who attended the event in which the king's representative swore his oath. This image is the largest in the book, and requires the reader to pull it out to its full size to view all of the names.
  
  The following video demonstrates how users would have interacted with this image:
  
  
  
  Using data gleaned from the book's text and images, including the one above, we were able to discover and track the names and ranks of those listed in the text, who was present at each locale, how they proceeded from one place to the next, and in what numbers.
  
  The network graph below maps out the dignitaries who attended each event, as well as those who were absent:
  
  
  Move on to the next page to explore the events in which these dignitaries participated.