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Who appears together with Cailleux in Cleveland's provenance texts? |
In this post, we will apply different "diagnostic" tools to these same museum provenance texts to identify, measure and visualize the art market networks involved in the the "Cailleux" artworks.
First, we'll identify the people and organizations that are mentioned in the same provenances as Cailleux. Then we'll plug this list of names into another tool - Voyant-Tools - to get a snapshot of their relative frequency and importance in the corpus. And finally, we'll visualize the networks.
This data is for only one name (Cailleux) in the provenance of only one museum (Cleveland)- an extremely small dataset.
The approach is to start with this modest experiment on a small number of provenances, and, when a data pipeline seems to work smoothly, to apply thus digital method to another museum, and another, and finally to include all the provenances for all the museums that mention Cailleux worldwide.
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Who is named in the same provenances as Cailleux? To find out we use Named Entity Extractor TextRazor.
The first thing we want to know is which people and organizations appear in the same provenance texts as Cailleux. There are many digital tools and methods that can do this. What we are looking for are reliable, easy-to-use, open access tools that anyone can use with little training. In previous testing of Named Entity Recognition Tools, TextRazor emerged as one of our favorites for its relative accuracy combined with extreme ease-of-use, so we will use it here. |
| https://www.textrazor.com |
1. We paste the provenances that contain Cailleux at the Cleveland Museum of Art into the Textrazor demo:
2. Textrazor extracts a long list of topics, categories, people, etc:
3. We are going to focus exclusively on "People/Person" and "Organizations" identified by Textrazor in the provenance texts:
Given that they appeared somewhere in the provenance texts that were selected from the Cleveland Museum because they contained the word "Cailleux", we are going to take a leap and assume that there might be some connection between these names and "Cailleux". At the very least, we know they appeared in the same provenance text for a given museum.
4. With this list of names, we will move to the next step, measuring the frequency of the appearance of the persons and organizations in provenances that mention Cailleux, as well as their relative closeness to Cailleux and to each other.
To get a quick visualization we will further simplify the list returned by TextRazor and plug it into a second digital tool, Voyant-Tools as a Whitelist: (keywords-66cdd62ddce6034deab26ba4bffd64fc)
Voyant-Tools generates the Word Cloud below. The most prominent names for Cleveland are Cailleux (of course), with 30 mentions, followed by Cleveland and CMA. Of more interest are Kanzler, Gamay, Montsabert, Gulbenkian, Petit, Schiedlausky and Reichsleiter, the last two being names that appear frequently in connection to Nazi looted art.
Before we start looking at networks, a question:
How different would this image be if we included not only Cailleux provenance for the Cleveland Museum of Art, but also those for the National Gallery of Art?
to be continued in the next post....
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