Paul Signac, Place des Lices, St. Tropez (detail), 1893. Carnegie Museum of Art, Acquired through the generosity of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Family, 66.24.2.

Publications & Articles

Museum Blog

The Art Tracks team regularly contibutes articles to the Carnegie Museum of Art's blog. The complete listing of posts is available, and some recent highlights include:

There is also an ongoing series of articles about the ongoing research into the provenance of our collection written by Costas Karakatsanis, a member of the Art Tracks Team.

Scholarly Publications and Presentations

Art Tracks regularly presents and publishes about their work.

Art Tracks: Modeling Provenance for Computers (Keystone DH, University of Pennsylvania, July 22, 2015)

Abstract
Art Tracks is a new initiative by the Carnegie Museum of Art to turn provenance in to useful searchable data that will help us tell the stories of our artwork, our institution, and of the history of art collecting, with the goal of building connections between institutions. Provenance is the written description of the history of ownership and custody of artwork, written as a list of the periods, places, and owners of an artwork. It captures the current best understanding of this history in a succinct and precise manner, and illustrates the gaps and uncertainties that still remain. This record provides important background information and is essential for research and historical analysis Provenance is typically written as semi-structured text, following an institution-defined format. It would be useful to have a structured, computer-readable format for this data, allowing for search, visualization, and aggregated research. The American Alliance of Museums suggested standard, widely used across museums, is not sufficiently specific, and this prevents automated extraction of the structured data contained within provenance texts. Additionally, the provenance record model in collection management systems is often not designed for structured data or does not provide a way to verify that the provenance text matches the structured data. A comprehensive text-based provenance standard, paired with a software library that can parse records written using this standard and convert them into structured data, would allow existing workflows to remain in place while allowing structured data to be automatically extracted from provenance records. The records could continue to be stored within existing collection management system data structures, but contain extractable, machine-readable data for use in research and visualization.

Slides from this presentation are available.

Art Tracks: Visualizing the Stories and Lifespan of an Artwork (Museum Computer Network, 2015)

This paper, describing our work to-date on Art Tracks, Phase I, was also presented at Museums & the Web on April 10, 2015.

Abstract
The Carnegie Museum of Art is attempting to structure provenance data so curators, scholars, and software developers can create visualizations that answer questions that would be difficult or impossible to answer without computer assistance. Provenance, the written description of the history of ownership and custody of art, is typically written as a list of the periods, places, and owners of an artwork. It captures the current best understanding of this history in a succinct and precise manner, and illustrates the gaps and uncertainties that still remain. Provenance is typically written as semi-structured text, following an institution-defined format. It would be useful to have a structured, computer-readable format for this data, allowing for search, visualization, and aggregated research. The American Alliance of Museums suggested standard, widely used across museums, is not defined with enough specificity to allow automated extraction of the structured data contained within provenance texts. Also, the provenance record model in collection management systems (CMS) is often not designed for structured data or does not provide a way to verify that the provenance text matches the structured data. A comprehensive text-based provenance standard, paired with a software library that can parse records written using this standard and convert them into structured data, would allow existing workflows to remain in place while allowing structured data to be automatically extracted from provenance records. The records could continue to be stored within existing CMS databases but contain machine-readable data for use in research and visualization. Outside of data itself, the stories these objects hold are often moving and sometimes astonishing. This ability to ask impossible questions and receive answers previously inaccessible across a museum’s collection and (eventually) across many museums’ collections is a resource art historians and scholars will find extremely valuable.

Slides from this presentation are available.

The Art Tracks Project at CMoA: Turning Provenance into Structured Data (History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh. March 4, 2015)

The University of Pittsburgh's History of Art & Architecture Colloquium series invited the Art Tracks team to present on their work to the department.

Slides from this presentation are available.

Visual(ized) Culture: Mapping Artists, Objects, and Institutions Across Time and Space (AAMC, 2/11/2015)

Abstract
This talk will introduce two digital tools currently under development at Carnegie Museum of Art and consider their potential applications for curatorial and art historical research. The first program, Art Tracks: The Provenance Visualization Project, will envisage the lifespan of art objects from creation to the present by structuring provenance and exhibition history data. Users will be able to create dynamic visualizations to answer (or raise new) questions about how, where, and when objects intersected with various collectors, audiences, other artworks, and historic world events. The second program, Cinema Circuit, will visualize the screening tour schedules—and by extension, the shifting institutional support network—of avant-garde filmmakers utilizing data from the Film and Video Makers Travel Sheet, a monthly circular that CMOA’s groundbreaking Film Section distributed to alt cinemas, museums, media centers, and universities across the country between 1973 and 2003. Both programs are intended to become open source resources and repositories for documentation and ephemera.

Date Parsing for Cultural Institutions (pghrb, December 4, 2014)

Articles About Art Tracks

There have been several articles written about the Art Tracks project over the years. Below is an incomplete list of articles and blog posts about our ongoing work.

Mentions of Art Tracks