InfluViz — A Visualization Tool for Exploring and Analyzing Creative Influence Between Artists and their Works

This paper describes the design and development of an interactive tool for explorative visualization of influence networks between artists. Developed in an interdisciplinary collaboration of computer scientists and art historians, the tool aims at supporting art historians and other interested parties in the interactive discovery and analysis of creative influences between a group of artists and their works. The influences are based on the judgements of art historians for pairs of works and an aggregation formula. The tool consists of multiple visualizations, each representing a different level of detail. In addition to metadata, e.g. the date of a work of art, and images of the works of art, influences between works or (if aggregated) between artists are displayed in graph form. A preliminary evaluation of the prototype with a non-expert audience as well as domain experts points to opportunities and areas of potential improvement in applying this approach to support novel research and exploration practices in digital art history.