Data-Driven Art History: A Conversation

Please join us on Friday, November 11 at 11AM ET for the Virtual Salon “Data-Driven Art History: A Conversation.” This series of online events is cosponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art.

While all art history can be defined as data-based, the term “data-driven art history” has come to signify quantitative methodologies adopted from sociology and economics and applied to datasets like exhibition catalogs and sales records. The results can be used to analyze the entire field of art production, its reception and its transformation into canonical art history. In this Salon, two major proponents of data-driven art history, Dr. Christian Huemer and Dr. Diana Seave Greenwald will discuss their work and offer their thoughts on the possibilities and promise of this methodology.

Christian Huemer is Director of the Belvedere Research Center in Vienna where he is in charge of the museum’s analog and digital research infrastructure. He is also president of DArtHist Austria – the national network for digital art history. Previously he was responsible for the development of the Getty Provenance Index® Databases, including data-driven research projects that led to publications such as London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780-1820 (co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash).

Diana Seave Greenwald is William and Lia Poorvu Interim Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is the author of Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton University Press, 2021). She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art and at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

The event is free and open to the public but registration is required at: https://tinyurl.com/data-driven-art