Data-Driven Maps of Art History

Abstract

Many approaches to explain conceptions of developments in the arts to both peers and a more general audience included diagrams representing networks of related entities such as genealogies of important historical actors or styles. While such visualizations were traditionally created by hand, the recent emergence of extensive digital repositories of art history information enable new means of presentation. This work seeks to explore the potential of openly available data sources to create bottom-up, data driven versions of such network maps of art history. It highlights commonalities and differences between views derived from institutional and crowd-sourced data repositories and compares them with identified historical examples. The results suggest that the available data can be used to create largescale views on specific developments in art history, potentially serving as aid for navigating vast online collections of digitized artworks but also as means of reflection on the origin of the data sources themselves.