This keynote presentation was given by David Newbury and Louise Lippincott as part of the Smithsonian Provenance Research Institute's PREP program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on February 7th, 2017

1. Art Tracks
From Provenance Texts
to Structured Data
Louise Lippincott
Curator of Fine Arts
Carnegie Museum of Art
David Newbury
Lead Developer, Art Tracks
Carnegie Museum of Art

2. Due Diligence: Legal Ownership

3. Due Diligence: Establish Authenticity

4. Due Diligence: Inform Connoisseurship

5. What can you do with it? The Analog World
Unknown Florentine. Unknown collector, England, 1800? until 1857? [1];
Possibly Miss Rogers, London, in 1857 [2]; Collis P. Huntington [1821-1900], New
York, NY, until 1900; by descent to Arabella D. Huntington, his widow [1851-
1924], New York, NY, 1900 until 1924 [3]; by descent to Archer Milton
Huntington [1870-1955], New York, NY, 1924 until 1925 [4]; bequest to
Metropolitan Museum of Art [1870-], New York, 1925 [5]; sold at American Art
Galleries, New York, November 20, 1925, no. 106. Arthur E. Braun [-1976],
Pittsburgh, until 1976. By descent to Mrs. Paul B. Ernst, his daughter, Pittsburgh,
1978 [6]; gift to Museum, in 1978.
NOTES:
1. In England by the mid 19th century when restored by F. Leedham who was
active in London c.1830-1860. 2. Waagen II p. 269. "Agnolo Bronzino. Portrait of
Leonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I., Grand Duke of Tuscany; half the size of life.
An admirable work, distinguished from most of the pictures by this master by
the transparency and warmth of the flesh tones." 3. Collis P. Huntington passed
life interest of this work to Arabella, his second wife, upon his death. Arabella
married Henry E. Huntington [1850-1927], who was the nephew of Collis P.
Huntington, in 1913. She is referred to as "Mrs. Henry E. Huntington" in
documents after 1913. 4. Although life interest in this work was transfered to
Archer Huntington from Arabella Huntington after her death, he terminated his
life interest in 1925. 5. This was the bequest of Collis P. Huntington, but he gave
life interest to his wife and then subsequently her son, before Archer terminated
his life interest and gave the work in the Metropolitan. Arabella was a prolific
collector, and at her death, this work, along with many others, were given by her
son to the Metropolitan Museum. This was Metropolitan Museum accession
number 25.110.131. 6. Her full name is Elizabeth Braun Ernst.

7. What can you do with it?
The Digital World
The CMOA Provenance Standard
A Linked Data representation of the
AAM provenance recommendations.
http://www.museumprovenance.org

8. museum_provenance
Software for automatically parsing
provenance texts into structured data
https://github.com/arttracks/museum_provenance
What can you do with it?
The Digital World

9. Elysa
A user interface for editing
and visualizing provenance texts
https://github.com/arttracks/elysa
What can you do with it?
The Digital World

10. The Digital World
Elysa, our user interface for editing provenance.
(https://github.com/arttracks/elysa)

11. Analog meets Digital: First Encounters
Analog/Curators
• We have lots of data!
• We guesstimate a lot!
• Messy human behavior!
• Paintings, books, documents!
• Inches, miles, oceans!
• Years, decades, centuries!
• Easy to do in my world!
• Not possible in my world!
Digital/Technologists
• No you don’t!
• We are ridiculously exact!
• Obsessive rule followers!
• Numbers, dates, code!
• Pixels and bytes!
• Nanoseconds, next week!
• Really hard in my world!
• Easy to solve in my world!

12. Art Tracks:
Advancing scholarship
• Create bigger data sets by
standardizing and sharing data
• Data mining & pattern detection
• Visualizations
• New questions

13. Art Tracks:
Disrupting Museums
& Art History
• Objects become data;
collections become databases
• Data that can be reused, and
grows more valuable over time
• Multiple stories become possible
• A digital enterprise erasing
institutional & disciplinary
boundaries

14. Event-Based
Digital Art History
• Yale Center for British Art
• Freer and Sackler Galleries
• Getty Provenance Index
• Itinera, University of Pittsburgh
• Johnson Collection, PMA
• Mapping Titian, Boston University
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, CMU
• American Art Collaborative
• Palladio, Stanford
…and many, many more.