Measuring Art Historical Networks

Matthew Lincoln (Carnegie Mellon University)

This video discusses network analysis in the context of art history. It shows how network analysis was used to examine networks of Dutch printmaking collaborations to study change in the industry decade by decade. The video notes that a number of other digital humanities tools and methods were used to build the dataset before it could be studied with network analysis software, such as web scraping of museum websites to gather information about pieces of art and using R to manipulate and analyze the data.

Further Reading and Resources

Miriam Keinle, ed. “Visualizing Networks: Approaches to Network Analysis in Art History.” Special issue, Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 3, Fall 2017. This journal special issue collects several articles on art historical network analysis that demonstrate a variety of approaches and research questions in a thoughtful and critical way. A portion of the project I describe in my presentation is included as an article here. More on my research can be found on my Github.

Matthew D. Lincoln, “Confabulation in the Humanities,” March 21, 2015. This is a blog post that explains, through a playful example from this printmaking networks question, the dangers humanists face when coming up with interpretations upon first glancing any kind of data visualization.

July 3, 2019. Digital Art History, Network Analysis

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Matthew Lincoln (Carnegie Mellon University)

Dr. Matthew Lincoln is the Digital Humanities Developer at dSHARP, the digital scholarship center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he focuses on computational and data-driven approaches to the study of history and culture. His current book project with Getty Publications, co-authored with Dr. Sandra van Ginhoven, uses data-driven modeling, network analysis, and textual analysis to mine the Getty Provenance Index Databases for insights into the history of collecting and the art market. He earned his PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park, and has held positions at the Getty Research Institute and the National Gallery of Art. He is an editorial board member of The Programming Historian.