GEOSTORY

A Geospacial Analysis of the Passions of Art Historians


Scroll to Start the virtual journey

Background

Geostory is a distributional geospatial analysis that explores connections between the birth country, citizenship and the artistic styles they studied in various institutions.


The aim of Geostory is to understand which factors influence art historians the most when choosing an artistic period to study. Are they influenced by their origins or by other factors?


This can be especially useful for students of art history for choosing where to carry out their research.


After a keen analysis of open and reusable data retrieved from ARTchives and Wikidata we have decided to focus on art historians and to extend our research to the properties and entities related to them and their work.


The team of Artelling invites you to explore our data in this visual journey!


Let's begin!


...

Dear Art History Major,


Have you ever wondered

if the country where you were born or where you live

has an impact on your research interests in art history?
...
What other factors can influence the choice of your research?
...
Which artistic periods are you interested in?
Where are the most suitable places to conduct your research?
...
The creators of Geostory would like to help you decide!
We invite you on this journey put together based on the digital archive ARTchives and Wikidata.

Keep scrolling to begin!

Home sweet home


Let's begin with the origins.


Where do ARTchives' art historians come from?


Take a look at the map to locate the cities and countries where they where born.



Therefore, we can conculde that...


50%

come from

Germany;


25%

come from

Italy;


25%

come from

the USA;


8,1%

come from

England;


4,1%

come from

Hungary;


8,1%

come from

Russia.

Connecting the dots


Based on what we have seen so far, you might be wondering:

If there is a relationship between the citizenship and the period studied in the collections of these historians?

and/or

if they were affected by another factors?

To answer these quetstions, let's start by taking a look at the chart on the right!

It shows the preferred artistic period(s) of each art historian.

It immediately pops out from the graph that the artistic period of major interest is

the renaissance


followed by the 16th century and the baroque.

Multitaskers


But how many artistic periods did each art historian study?


Who studied the most periods?

Hover the cursor over the pie chart to see the number of collections each art historians curated.

The art historians that curated the most artistic periods in their collections are

all Italians.


Let's dig deeper



The graph below shows the art historians grouped by their nationality to see which groups curated the most periods.



Culture shock


We have seen from the charts that even though:


  • half of the art historians come from Germany,

  • the most productive art historians are Italians.

Could this be another relevant factor in the choice of studying a given artistic period?


Mapping the territory


The map below shows the institutes where each art historian worked on their collections.


The institutes in Artchives


We can see from the pie chart that 80% of the institutes are in Italy.

Namely, there are

4

institutes in

Italy,


and

1

in the USA.


...
...
Federico Zeri Foundation – UniBO
Bologna, Italy
...
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Florence, Italy
...
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Pisa, Italy
...
Getty Research Institute
Los Angeles, Californa, USA

Collections & Institutes


Now, let's look into the collections in the institutes


The graph below tells us that each art historian worked on at least one collection.


Let's see which are the richest collections.


N.B.The collections are named after the art historians.

...

Take a closer look!

Let's put everything together!

When comparing the number of artistic periods

in the collections they curated

with

the graph of the periods each of them studied,

we can conclude that some collections are richer than others.

But!

Each and every institute holds all of the collections.


Key takeaways

Conclusions

Germany

Is where the majority of art historians come from.

However, Italian art historians researched more artistic periods.

Renaissaince

Is the center of attention.

It is the most researched artistic style in all countries followed by the 16th century and the baroque.

Italy

Is the country with the most art institutes and with the richest collections

80% of the institutes are in Italy, there is one institute in the USA.

The most important factor

for choosing a place for research in art history...

Is not determined by one's nationality,

but by the location of the institutes

and the consequent location of the materials needed for a given research.


So, dear Art History Major,


Before hitting the road, remember to look at the right place!


Team

Ariele Santello
Graduated in Modern Literature at the University of Bologna with a thesis about Weblogs. She is now attending the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge Master at the University of Bologna. She has always been in love with culture and art and she is now trying to exploit technologies as a mean to spread cultural issues over an audience as wide as possible. She loves everything related to Japan and she finds happiness in good weather and great food with good company.
Role
Knowledge extraction, data analysis, data visualization, website
Benedetta Togni
Graduated in Languages and Cultures for the Publishing Industry at the University of Verona where she cultivated her interests in german linguistics and literature. She is now a student of Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge in Bologna. She has a troubled and unrequited love with both German language and Python programming. She is interested in data analysis and data visualization. Her free time passions are martial arts, every shade of rock music and good movies.
Role
Data cleaning, data analysis, data visualization and storytelling
Giulia Massimino
Student at the University of Bologna, attending the Master's Degree of Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge. She took a Master's Degree at the University of Urbino in Foreign Languages and she worked in the field of translation and localization. Giulia loves travelling and exploring natural and cultural beauties all over the world. She has a great passion in learning information technologies and employ them for the the conservation and enrichment of artistic and cultural issues.
Role
Knowledge extraction, data cleaning and analysis, data visualization
Szilvia Baráth
Currently attending the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge Master’s programme at the University of Bologna and has been working as a language teacher since her graduation in Language Teaching at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her interests include cultures, languages and literature which she studied during her Bachelor’s in English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University and at NOVA University Lisbon. She is a hobby artist experimenting with the possibilities provided by digital tablets and software. Her main focus is integrating digital technologies into education such as creation of tools for language learning and interactive content to facilitate socio-cultural education.
Role
Storytelling, website, communication

Social

Github repository
Digital Humanities at UniBO

Licenses

This work is licensed under a CC Attributions 4.0 International License.

Content from Artchives is licensed under a Creative Commons 0.0 Licence.