Networking the Archive: The Stories and Structures of Thos. Agnew's Stock Books

TY - JOUR

T1 - Networking the Archive

T2 - The Stories and Structures of Thos. Agnew's Stock Books

AU - Noble, Laura

AU - Vavassori, Valentina

AU - Crookham, Alan

AU - Dunn, Stuart

N1 - Funding Information: In 2017 the National Gallery Research Centre and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London (NG/DDH) won funding from the King’s Cultural Institute for a small collaborative project, also involving the King’s Digital Lab (KDL), entitled Reframing Art: Opening up art dealers’ archives to multidisciplinary research. Its aim was to explore the proposition that flat imagery depicting historical transactional data could, through a relatively straightforward and cost-effective digital intervention, be transformed into a Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.

PY - 2022/2

Y1 - 2022/2

N2 - This paper reflects on the recent collaboration between the National Gallery Research Centre and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London (NG/DDH). Using the stock books located in the archives of the art dealers Thos. Agnew & Sons as an example, NG/DDH sought to address the potential that such archival sources might have in the world of digital research and Digital Asset Management. Building on this research, NG/DDH participated in the Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History, which encouraged us to think particularly about the role and nature of network analysis in the field of Digital Art History. In this paper we briefly describe the technical process of digitization, and the possibilities opened up by converting the transactional information contained in the stock books into structured data. We then set this in the historical context of network structures, as embodied by the World Wide Web and social media, and especially the distinction that these types of network have entrenched between objects (or persons) and topics (or other abstract entities). We conclude with an argument that problematizing this distinction - which is enshrined in the whole concept of networks and network analysis - is key if this method is to be applied to art history research.

AB - This paper reflects on the recent collaboration between the National Gallery Research Centre and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London (NG/DDH). Using the stock books located in the archives of the art dealers Thos. Agnew & Sons as an example, NG/DDH sought to address the potential that such archival sources might have in the world of digital research and Digital Asset Management. Building on this research, NG/DDH participated in the Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History, which encouraged us to think particularly about the role and nature of network analysis in the field of Digital Art History. In this paper we briefly describe the technical process of digitization, and the possibilities opened up by converting the transactional information contained in the stock books into structured data. We then set this in the historical context of network structures, as embodied by the World Wide Web and social media, and especially the distinction that these types of network have entrenched between objects (or persons) and topics (or other abstract entities). We conclude with an argument that problematizing this distinction - which is enshrined in the whole concept of networks and network analysis - is key if this method is to be applied to art history research.

KW - Archives

KW - cultural heritage

KW - digital art history

KW - network analysis

KW - social media

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85127746153&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3479009

DO - 10.1145/3479009

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85127746153

SN - 1556-4673

VL - 15

JO - ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

JF - ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

IS - 1

M1 - 12

ER -