Maximilian Schich of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University, will be giving a talk on “Understanding the Ecology of Art History”, 4:00pm Tuesday, December 13th in the Lownes Room of the John Hay Library.

Within their work, art historians, archeologists, and their predecessors across centuries have accumulated large amounts of structured data, in the form of indices, inventories, catalogues, and databases. In addition more and more such structured data is published in places such as the Linked Open Data cloud or Freebase.com;extracted from unstructured sources such as Google Books or JSTOR; or accumulated by crowds in services such as Flickr or Facebook. Meanwhile the multidisciplinary fields of complexity science in general, and complex network research in particular, provide more and more methods and tools that allow us to explore these data beyond the traditional limits of reference catalogues, printed books, or database interfaces. As a consequence, we are presented with an extraordinary chance to make significant progress in the key mission of art research, namely to uncover the morphology, ecology and evolution of cultural artifacts, understanding meso- as well as global-scale phenomena that characterize the complex system of culture. Making use of this situation, my talk will map structured data collections ranging from simple bibliographies to complicated research databases as networks of complex networks between objects, persons, locations, time ranges and events. Highlighting surprising phenomena in these networks, I will make a convincing case for high-throughput approaches in art history, embed the datasets in question in a
multidisciplinary universe of data, and show that even seemingly boring pieces of data can contain thrilling insights that are mission critical for our entire discipline.