Search

The paper presents the current stage of an ongoing project at the Fondazione Federico Zeri, aimed at the modelling of the art market starting from the recognition of the peculiarities of this sector and relying on the data collected by this institute during its research activities on its documentary collection. Specifically, this essay provides a preliminary analysis of the domain, aimed at guiding in the development of an ontology able to describe agents, events and sources which define the art market and enable its investigation. The recognition of existing conceptual models is hence followed by a reconstruction of the studied domain thanks to motivating scenario, examples and competency questions collected during the first iteration of the SAMOD methodology. For each scenario, the paper will provide the most relevant entities and will draft an alignment with existing ontologies, as well as propose necessary integrations.

Keywords: Computer Vision; Distant Viewing; Distant Reading; Digital Art History EN Computer Vision Distant Viewing Distant Reading Digital Art History 1 5 5 11/02/23 20230701 NES 230701 Introduction While digital literary studies are well established, digital art history is only taking its first baby steps. We review the literature to identify similarities in goals and challenges in digital art history and digital literary studies and how the experience of the latter can help to define research questions most suitable for using machine-aided vision in art history. This essay primarily relies on the articles on digital art history ([26], [12][5]), critique of the quantitative approach in art history ([25]), and theoretical and methodological inquiries on digital literary studies ([32][23][8]). Digital Art History and Digital Literary studies Digital art history and digital literary studies are the disciplines under the umbrella term of digital humanities - an area broadly described as an intersection of humanities disciplines and computing or digital technologies [10][7]. [Extracted from the article]

Hands represent an important aspect of pictorial narration but have rarely been addressed as an object of study in art history and digital humanities. Although hand gestures play a significant role in conveying emotions, narratives, and cultural symbolism in the context of visual art, a comprehensive terminology for the classification of depicted hand poses is still lacking. In this article, we present the process of creating a new annotated dataset of pictorial hand poses. The dataset is based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hands are extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods. The hand images are then manually annotated based on art historical categorization schemes. From this categorization, we introduce a new classification task and perform a series of experiments using different types of features, including our newly introduced 2D hand keypoint features, as well as existing neural network-based features. This classification task represents a new and complex challenge due to the subtle and contextually dependent differences between depicted hands. The presented computational approach to hand pose recognition in paintings represents an initial attempt to tackle this challenge, which could potentially advance the use of HPE methods on paintings, as well as foster new research on the understanding of hand gestures in art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advocates an epistemological turn in the field of digital art history and cultural heritage studies. This epistemological turn is understood as the elaboration of a new (or renewed) epistemic apparatus that allows us to understand and interpret cultural phenomena from the perspective of a different order of thought. This epistemological labor is conceived of as an «epistemological technical practice», which means integrating epistemological reflection and production into technical making and design. Within this framework of discussion, this paper introduces the idea of a techno-concept, which is defined as a co-production between the machine rationale and the human thought/imagination. As particular cases, this paper argues that the mathematical concepts of n-dimensional, vector and latent spaces constitute examples of techno-concepts that can be reappropriated and reworked for cultural analysis and interpretation. This paper offers a preliminary inquiry, in which certain epistemological propositions are exposed as open gates for further discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hands represent an important aspect of pictorial narration but have rarely been addressed as an object of study in art history and digital humanities. Although hand gestures play a significant role in conveying emotions, narratives, and cultural symbolism in the context of visual art, a comprehensive terminology for the classification of depicted hand poses is still lacking. In this article, we present the process of creating a new annotated dataset of pictorial hand poses. The dataset is based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hands are extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods. The hand images are then manually annotated based on art historical categorization schemes. From this categorization, we introduce a new classification task and perform a series of experiments using different types of features, including our newly introduced 2D hand keypoint features, as well as existing neural network-based features. This classification task represents a new and complex challenge due to the subtle and contextually dependent differences between depicted hands. The presented computational approach to hand pose recognition in paintings represents an initial attempt to tackle this challenge, which could potentially advance the use of HPE methods on paintings, as well as foster new research on the understanding of hand gestures in art.

The use of regression modelling to understand how characteristics of artworks, of artists, and of the circumstances of sale affect the price paid at auction is well-established among cultural economists. Drawing on auction sales data provided by Artprice (accessed on 20 March 2022) I use regression modelling to investigate the determinants of the price paid for artworks by twelve artists at auctions of contemporary art over the period from 1984 to 2019. Each of the artists is modelled separately. For nine of the twelve artists, there was a clear preference among collectors for paintings with specific titles rather than untitled paintings or paintings with generic titles such as 'abstract' or 'composition'. For the other explanatory factors included in the models, my analysis complements and re-contextualizes previous scholarship, showing how collectors' preferences differed between the contexts examined. Size was a stronger driver of the price paid than in the contexts examined in other studies, and for most artists, collectors were not deterred by the largest artworks. Paintings in oil have continued to appeal to some collectors. Although the number of artists looked at is small, there are some suggestive patterns in how the age of the artist at execution affected the auction price, which might merit further investigation. My models also give some insights into change within the auction market for contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pioneers a new computational approach for the study of changes in shape of objects across time. Previously, such a study was undertaken by scholars using a purely visual approach and relied on images of objects or in-person observations. This paper’s approach is based on 3D scans of historical artefacts. Sample points are extracted from these 3D scans and the distance between analogous points across different objects is computed using an approximation of the Wasserstein metric, namely the Sinkhorn distance. In this paper, the approach is demonstrated on a small set of ancient Greek vessels of the Krater, Pelike, and Kylix types, as the variation in their shapes across time is well known to archaeologists. Results offer, for the first time, a way of quantifying differences between objects. Benefits of this approach lie in its ability to quantify change, to study complex 3D material, and to analyse large datasets of objects, opening the possibility of constructing new large-scale studies of object shape across time and geographical regions. These have a range of applications in art history, archaeology, digital humanities, museology and extended reality studies.

This paper pioneers a new computational approach for the study of changes in shape of objects across time. Previously, such a study was undertaken by scholars using a purely visual approach and relied on images of objects or in-person observations. This paper’s approach is based on 3D scans of historical artefacts. Sample points are extracted from these 3D scans and the distance between analogous points across different objects is computed using an approximation of the Wasserstein metric, namely the Sinkhorn distance. In this paper, the approach is demonstrated on a small set of ancient Greek vessels of the Krater, Pelike, and Kylix types, as the variation in their shapes across time is well known to archaeologists. Results offer, for the first time, a way of quantifying differences between objects. Benefits of this approach lie in its ability to quantify change, to study complex 3D material, and to analyse large datasets of objects, opening the possibility of constructing new large-scale studies of object shape across time and geographical regions. These have a range of applications in art history, archaeology, digital humanities, museology and extended reality studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenthcentury Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters' choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists' thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist's ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this article visualises the artistic network implied in Rembrandt's rivals by Eric Jan Sluijter, which helps explain the breakaway success of the Dismissal of Hagar paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how the Replica project is a particular case of different professionals coming together to achieve the digitization of a historical photographic archive, intersecting complementary knowledge specific to normally unconnected communities. In particular the community of Art History researchers, brought together here in relation to their common methodologies in the practice of visual pattern research, became protagonists in the construction of a specific tool, the Morphograph, to navigate through the archive’s photos. A specific research problem, the recognition of visual patterns migrating from one work to another, became the key to developing a new technology initially intended for a specific community of users, but with such a generic character in its approach that it could easily be made available to other uninformed users as learning by doing tools. The Morphograph tool also made it possible to demonstrate how, within a community, the partial expertise of individuality needs to be related to each other and benefits enormously from the knowledge densification mechanism made possible by the sharing. The digital context easily makes it possible to create tools that are specific in terms of content but generic in form that can be communicated and shared with even diverse and uninformed communities.

This paper advocates an epistemological turn in the field of digital art history and cultural heritage studies. This epistemological turn is understood as the elaboration of a new (or renewed) epistemic apparatus that allows us to understand and interpret cultural phenomena from the perspective of a different order of thought. This epistemological labor is conceived of as an «epistemological technical practice», which means integrating epistemological reflection and production into technical making and design. Within this framework of discussion, this paper introduces the idea of a techno-concept, which is defined as a co-production between the machine rationale and the human thought/imagination. As particular cases, this paper argues that the mathematical concepts of n-dimensional, vector and latent spaces constitute examples of techno-concepts that can be reappropriated and reworked for cultural analysis and interpretation. This paper offers a preliminary inquiry, in which certain epistemological propositions are exposed as open gates for further discussions.

The increasing use of ICT is radically changing research methodologies in art history. In such a rapidly evolving context, predictably, art history shall increasingly benefit from Knowledge Representation & Automated Reasoning methodologies related to several aspects, namely data classification and integration, interoperability between different data sources, and semantically driven response to archival queries. In particular, the Semantic Web and interoperable archives seem to embody the universalist dream of some 20th century visionary projects. In the light of the challenges posed by new technologies, the archive remains a significant space that calls for reflection on conceptual models for the representation of knowledge and on the effects that the logic of computation will have on the way we experience cultural heritage.

The perception of our heritage is based on sign-functions, which relate visual representations to cognitive types, allowing us to make perceptual judgements over physical objects. The recording of these types of assertions is paramount for the comprehension and analysis of our heritage. The article investigates a theoretical framework for the organization of information related to visual works on the basis of the identity and symbolic value of their single constituent elements. The framework developed is then used as a driver for the grounding of a new ontology called VIR (Visual Representation), constructed as an extension of CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model). VIR sustains the recording of statements about the different structural units and relationships of a visual representation, differentiating between object and interpretative act. The result, tested with data describing Byzantine and Renaissance artworks, presents solutions for describing symbols and meanings of iconographical objects, providing new clustering methods in relation to their constitutive elements, subjects or interpretations.

The use of regression modelling to understand how characteristics of artworks, of artists, and of the circumstances of sale affect the price paid at auction is well-established among cultural economists. Drawing on auction sales data provided by Artprice (accessed on 20 March 2022) I use regression modelling to investigate the determinants of the price paid for artworks by twelve artists at auctions of contemporary art over the period from 1984 to 2019. Each of the artists is modelled separately. For nine of the twelve artists, there was a clear preference among collectors for paintings with specific titles rather than untitled paintings or paintings with generic titles such as ‘abstract’ or ‘composition’. For the other explanatory factors included in the models, my analysis complements and re-contextualizes previous scholarship, showing how collectors’ preferences differed between the contexts examined. Size was a stronger driver of the price paid than in the contexts examined in other studies, and for most artists, collectors were not deterred by the largest artworks. Paintings in oil have continued to appeal to some collectors. Although the number of artists looked at is small, there are some suggestive patterns in how the age of the artist at execution affected the auction price, which might merit further investigation. My models also give some insights into change within the auction market for contemporary art.

A lexicon like the Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950 (Austrian Biographical Dictionary) seems to be as all in one cast because it is built on a set of formal rules for writing articles and some strict but basic criteria for the selection of new entries. The human reader can find information within that resource on a wide range of topics as well as detailed information about the life and career paths of historical individuals. An attempt to systematically analyze this information in a larger scale, however, is condemned to fail without the help of computational methods. In a first stage it is needed to convert unstructured text in structured information. Pieces of information, the so called biographical building blocks, can be identified in two ways: through natural language processing methods and by manual annotations. Both processes which are intertwined and - in the case of the APIS project - done in a custom-built virtual research environment provide the existing biographical data at hand for the analyses following in later stages. This paper aims at describing the data collection process on the example of place names which can be found in artist biographies and at demonstrating possible use cases for historical network research. In this context it is also outlined how this field of research can benefit particularly from biographical data.

This article addresses the current digital status in the fields of Museology and History of Art, both in Greece and internationally, in order to examine, record and analyse the extent of usage and the impact of digital tools. We will study the state-of-the-art in the fields of Museology and Art History, with a particular focus on examining the degree to which Greek institutions of culture and arts, as a case study in Europe, use state-of-the-art digital technologies (e.g., semantic technologies, augmented reality, and ubiquitous computing) for (a) storing, managing and documenting artworks together with all relevant knowledge/information; and (b) interpreting and presenting artworks to the public. We will also study and analyse the degree of interrelation between knowledge/information, and art and cultural heritage that is currently hosted in distinct cultural and art institutions around Greece, as well as between Greek institutions and relevant projects abroad. In this context, the issue at stake is the identity and the way Art History is exercised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]