Tack Spitter Circus

What was known as ‘The Golden Age of American Circus’ lasted, roughly, from the last quarter of the 1800’s through 1950. During that time, circus as an industry got a huge boost from the expansion of the transcontinental rail system and managed to survive the Great Depression. The poster advertisements from this era remain so wonderfully iconic – and the Ringling Museum website hosts an impressive 4,977 of them in one of their digital archives. I am now the proud owner of the metadata for the entire archive – thanks to Python scraping. I was surprised to find such an enormous array of troupes represented in the archive. Ringling and Barnum, Sells and Floto – these were givens. But then I found Carl Sagenbeck’s troupe and the Zallee Brothers’ and on and on. So for my first exploration into the data, I asked Python to parse through the title fields collecting and counting troupe names. This then lead me to realize troupe co-appearances on posters were an especially significant part of America circus history. Gephi allowed me to then upload that data for network analysis.