Wikidata Query: https://w.wiki/7pL2
This is a query that pulls all of the humans with occupation of “Cartoonist” with “United States of America” listed as their country of citizenship. I created this query all on my own by just using the Wikidata Query Helper and then adding in a few optional components about birth date/death date.
I worked to filter this down from a larger search that found every single cartoonist as I’m deeply interested in the US record of cartoonists given their centrality to the medium, and I’m hoping this kind of a search will aid other scholars and users in learning more about US cartoonists. In addition, I wanted to include their birth and death years, when applicable, as I think this helps provide much-needed context for how long many of these cartoonists lived and worked.
I opted for a simple data table as this search will remain that much more customizable. Right now, users can easily search through the data table and organize it by ascending or descending birth/death year, or they could customize my query further to look for cartoonists born after a specific year (say, on post-WWII cartoonists or those who passed away before the rise of digital comics). I also think this particular visualization is clear in just putting names to dates and professions, contextualizing cartoonists with one another. Data tables are great for showing information in tidy, organized ways, so this particular visualization lets us quickly read across for a given cartoonist, the description uploaded for them, and whether they are alive or not. In some cases, this also shows us gaps in the Wikidata record, as with the first few dozen cartoonists who have no entries for dates, birth or otherwise.
I struggled, initially, to filter down to just US Cartoonists. I realized that I kept trying to include “Country,” instead of “Country of Citizenship.” I got past this by looking at a few cartoonists’ Wikidata pages, and looked at commonalities between them, one of which was “Country of Citizenship.” What’s interesting here is that a few fictional characters are lumped in: Jon Arbuckle being a prime example (a fictional character within the strip Garfield, but it also shows that David Claypoole Johnston is the earliest Wikidata entry labelled “Cartoonist,” which aligns well with American cartooning history!
What is not shown is where these people were born, where they died, and *when* their cartoons were published. I think adding any of this information in would only enrich this visualization. I think, too, this many cartoonists is difficult to work with for sake of a timeline. I was working with the graph builder, and I think there is a way to create a very complex and large timeline showing birth/death year, but I’ll have to keep playing around with this. If we have the geographic locations for where they were born or died, we could work to map this information even further!
I learned here that Wikidata is finnicky, but robust. By finnicky, I mean that I had to be careful when using the Wikidata Query Helper: sometimes, when I would add in a property or value, then remove it from the Helper, the code would stay on the right side. I would have to work to make sure I wasn’t leaving something like a spectral trace of an old query with outdated code! But, Wikidata is robust because in the space of an afternoon, I was able to compile a list of over 1,000 American cartoonists, AND, integrate their birth/death dates. More still can be done by adding in more information about their gender, their notable works, etc.