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Effects of caste structure on community collaboration in India

A kolam from Tamil Nadu, India

A kolam from Tamil Nadu, India

The traditional Tamil art form known as the Kolam is a chalk drawing consisting of a line looped around a matrix of dots. Timothy Waring interviewed 300 women artists who draw these Kolam patterns and collected a small sample repertoire from each one. Waring’s research, which includes social network data connecting artists, will be used to test theories of information flow within cultural systems.

Credits: Courtesy of Timothy Waring