Missing art people and the Holocaust

How information about Jewish art  collectors who died in the Holocaust goes missing in the semantic web of linked data.

1. How many art collectors, dealers, curators, museum directors, art historians or gallery owners died in Nazi concentration camps, ghettos or jails?

As of this writing, Wikidata (which includes every entry in Wikipedia and more) can give us the names of exactly 21 persons.


Clearly, many names are missing. Why?

Because to be picked up in the Wikidata query used (https://w.wiki/Qb7) certain information (profession, death place) must have been registered by someone in Wikidata. If any of this information is missing, the query will not find the name.


2. What happens if we try to annotate the Wikidata list of 21 names using DBpedia Spotlight? 

The individuals exist in Wikidata. Will DBpedia, an important linked data hub, using by many tools for entity matching and linking, be able to identify these individuals and link to them via Spotlight?

To find out, we took the list of the 21 names produced by Wikidata, put them in sentence form and ran them through the DBpedia SPOTLIGHT annotation API.

This is the list of art collectors, dealers, historians, curators, etc who died in Nazi camps, ghettos or jails: Adam Abel died in Flossenbürg concentration camp, Anton Mayer died in Neuengamme concentration camp, August Liebmann Mayer died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, François Lang died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Friedrich Gutmann died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Fritz Grünbaum died in Dachau concentration camp, Gertrud Kantorowicz died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Heinrich Feurstein died in Dachau concentration camp, Henri Hinrichsen died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Karl Freund died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Leo Grünstein died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Lisa Hamburg died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lucien Graux died in Dachau concentration camp, Ludwig Pollak died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Max Frankenburger died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Max Silberberg died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Q28192906 died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Walter Cohen died in Dachau concentration camp, Walter Westfeld died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Wilhelm Kurtz died in Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, Wilhelm Mautner died in Auschwitz-Birkenau

3. As you can see from the results below, very few of these Holocaust victims were correctly identified. 

Of the 21, only four - Friedrich Gutmann, Fritz Grünbaum, Wilhelm Mautner and Ludwig Pollak - were correctly annotated in DBpedia Spotlight.

• Friedrich Bernhard Eugen "Fritz" Gutmann (15 November 1886 – 13 April 1944) was a Dutch banker and art collector.The collection and the fate of Fritz Gutmann is described by his grandson, Simon Goodman, in "The Orpheus Clock" (Pub. Simon & Schuster, Aug. 2015). (en)
• Fritz Grünbaum (7 April 1880 in Brno, Moravia as Franz Friedrich Grünbaum – 14 January 1941 at the Dachau concentration camp, Germany) was an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist, operetta and pop song writer, director, actor and master of ceremonies. (en)
• Wilhelm Mautner (1889-1944) was born in Vienna. He was an Austrian-German economist and attorney-in-fact of the Rotterdamse Bank who spent a part of his life in the Netherlands. Mautner was born Jewish. He was also an art collector. (en)
• Ludwig Pollak (14 September 1868, Prague – 1943, Auschwitz concentration camp) was an Austro-Czech classical archaeologist, antiquities dealer, and director of the Museo Barracco di Scultura Antica in Rome. He is perhaps best known for discovering in 1906 the missing right arm of Laocoön in the famous ancient Roman sculpture Laocoön and His Sons.

No matches or mistaken matches were found for 17 of the 21. Mistaken identities included: 

• Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (May 3, 1895 – September 9, 1963) was a German-American historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies (1957) on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state. (en)

• Karl W. Freund, A.S.C. (January 16, 1890 – May 3, 1969) was a cinematographer and film director best known for photographing Metropolis (1927), Dracula (1931), and television's I Love Lucy (1951-1957). (en)
• Leo Thomas McGarry is a fictional character played by American actor John Spencer on the television serial drama The West Wing. The role earned Spencer the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2002. McGarry's character, the former United States Secretary of Labor, begins the series as the White House Chief of Staff. He is President Josiah Bartlet's best friend and a father figure to the Senior Staff, particularly White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn. (en)
• Lisa Marie Simpson is a fictional character in the animated television series The Simpsons. She is the middle child and most intelligent of the Simpson family.
• Charles Graux (23 November 1852 – 8 January 1882) was a French classicist and palaeographer. Apart from scores of articles and reviews, he published important critical editions of works by Xenophon and Plutarch and pioneering, descriptive catalogs of the medieval copies of ancient Greek texts preserved in the libraries of Spain and Denmark. His most enduring contributions were to the history of ancient stichometry.
• This is a list of the major characters in Robotech, the American adaptation of three Japanese animated series: The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada, as a single TV series. The series is divided into parts called "generations" which are subtitled The Macross Saga, The Second Generation, and The New Generation
• Westfeld is a town in the district of Hildesheim in Lower Saxony, Germany.
• Kurtz is a central fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. A trader of ivory in Africa and commander of a trading post, he monopolises his position as a demigod among native Africans.

These errors occur even though the individuals exist in Wikidata and are coded with enough information (name, profession, place of death) to be picked up in the Wikidata Query.

4. Why is it so hard to match via DBpedia the names of Jewish Art Collectors who died in the Holocaust?

One reason (but not the only reason) is that, even though DBpedia includes Wikidata Qcodes, it still filters its linked data information through Wikipedia. 

So even if something exists in Wikidata and is properly referenced, it does not exist in DBpedia. 
That is a partial explanation. There are also individuals who exist in Wikipedia who are not picked up by DBpedia Spotlight in this exercise. 

Below is the JSON code produced by the DBpedia Spotlight annotation API.
(The @URI is the DPpedia resource.
The @surfaceForm is the word as it actually appeared in the text.)

In some cases, the problem begins with the identification of the surface form, like "Westfeld" instead of "Walter Westfeld" or "Max" instead of "Max Silberberg".

(Particularly amazing is the matching of Max to a List of Robotech characters. Thus, using advanced natural language processing, entity matching and reconciliation, the closest we get to linked data for Holocaust victim and art collector Max Silberberg is "major characters in Robotech, the American adaptation of three Japanese animated series: The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada"?)

This misidentification is all the more noteworthy because both Walter Westfeld and Max Silberberg have Wikipedia pages.

However Walter Westfeld's is only in German while Max Silberberg's are in German and Russian.

The lack of an English-language Wikipedia page is another reason for the individual's invisibility in any API that uses only English.

(There are more reasons, to be explored later)


5. Below: Result, in JSON, of the DBpedia Spotlight annotation of the names of the 21 art collectors and other lost art people who died in the Holocaust.

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}

TRY IT

curl -X GET "https://api.dbpedia-spotlight.org/en/annotate?text=%22This%20is%20the%20list%20of%20art%20collectors%2C%20dealers%2C%20historians%2C%20curators%2C%20etc%20who%20died%20in%20Nazi%20camps%2C%20ghettos%20or%20jails%3A%20Adam%20Abel%20died%20in%20Flossenb%C3%BCrg%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Anton%20Mayer%20died%20in%20Neuengamme%20concentration%20camp%2C%20August%20Liebmann%20Mayer%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Fran%C3%A7ois%20Lang%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Friedrich%20Gutmann%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Fritz%20Gr%C3%BCnbaum%20died%20in%20Dachau%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Gertrud%20Kantorowicz%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Heinrich%20Feurstein%20died%20in%20Dachau%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Henri%20Hinrichsen%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Karl%20Freund%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Leo%20Gr%C3%BCnstein%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Lisa%20Hamburg%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Lucien%20Graux%20died%20in%20Dachau%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Ludwig%20Pollak%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Max%20Frankenburger%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Max%20Silberberg%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Q28192906%20died%20in%20Theresienstadt%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Walter%20Cohen%20died%20in%20Dachau%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Walter%20Westfeld%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%20Wilhelm%20Kurtz%20died%20in%20Auschwitz%20II-Birkenau%20concentration%20camp%2C%20Wilhelm%20Mautner%20died%20in%20Auschwitz-Birkenau%2C%22" -H "accept: application/json"


6. Thoughts

People are relying increasingly on automated systems to retrieve, read, understand, summarise, link, analyse and repackage real world texts.  However the underlying reference systems are terribly weak when it comes to a topic like Jewish art collectors who died in the Holocaust. The resulting information loss and information distortion is likely to propagate throughout systems undetected, harming our knowledge of the world.
Automated quality control systems are unfit for dealing with this issue.


7. Comments, questions, and criticisms of this draft are most welcome.


 WIKIDATA QUERY

#Art Collectors and other art people who died in Nazi concentration camps or jails

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?placediedLabel ?placedied  WHERE {
{ ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q1792450.} UNION { ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q1007870. } UNION { ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q173950.} UNION { ?item wdt:P921 wd:Q328376.} UNION { ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q10732476.} UNION { ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q446966.} UNION { ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q22132694.} UNION { ?item wdt:P106 wd:Q674426.}


SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" }
?item wdt:P20 ?placedied.
{ ?placedied wdt:P31 wd:Q328468.} UNION { ?placedied wdt:P31 wd:Q152081. } UNION { ?placedied wdt:P31 wd:Q153813.} UNION { ?placedied wdt:P31 wd:Q153813.} UNION { ?placedied wdt:P31 wd:Q2583015.}}


____


PHOTO: http://www.silesiancollections.eu/Works-of-art/Painting/Renoir-Auguste-Reading

Visualizing the Art Market Networks of Hermann Voss

Network visualisation of Hermann Voss' connections, with his direct connections and the connection of his direct connections, according to the ALIU Final Report Red Flag list of Names of 1946.
(network graph generated automatically by google fusion tables-

With data visualisation tools, the graphical representation of the links between individuals in vast criminal networks is made possible. 

In the above graph, one sees the connections of Hermann Voss, as described in the 1946 OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit Final Report, which detailed the Nazi era art market network.

For each person in the ALIU "Red Flag List of Names" a brief paragraph summarises what is known about the person's role in the European Nazi-era art market. There are more than 1000 names on the list, each one with a few sentences of description, which typically includes a dozen or more attributes and connections.

The paragraph devoted to Voss in the Final Report contains 50 words, including his name.

Voss, Dr Hermann. Munich. Director of the Linz Special Commission, the Linz Musuem, and the Dresden Gallery from May 1943. Involved in the Schloss and Mannheimer collection (forced) sales, and the official chiefly responsible for Hitler’s looting and purchasing policies after 1945. In custody US 3rd Army, Munich, September 1945.

One can imagine that, due to practical contraints, the Art Looting Investigation Unit may have found it impossible to stuff everything they had learned about Hermann Voss into the one small paragraph allocated to each subject in the ALIU Final Report.

However, the "Voss, Dr Hermann" paragraph is not the only mention of Voss in the ALIU Final Report. 

A simple data filter in Sheets gives us the names linked to Voss in the ALIU Red Flag List/

Filtering for mentions of "Voss" in the shared Google Sheet "OSS ALIU Red Flag Names PUBLIC"

Voss, we see, is mentioned in 17 entries in the ALIU Red Flag List*.

Goepel, Grosshennig, Gurlitt [the father of Bavarian art hoarder, Cornelius], Nadolle, Oertel, Pat-Zaade, Posse, Reimer, Schilling, Schmidt, Voss, Waldner, Weber, Zinckgraf, Mandl, de Boer, Hoogendijk,.

Each one of the above individuals, who the ALIU believed to be connected to Voss, had his own network, or "cluster".  

It is by joining together these different clusters that we are able to extract information that can be used to visualize the Nazi art market network - as analysed by the Art Looting Investigation Unit in 1946.

It is these mentions that we will use to select the data for network analysis.

-----

How to map the direct connections of Dr. Hermann Voss using Google Sheets and Google Fusion Tables

In our experiments we used the following method to prepare the data:

1) copy the entire ALIU Red Flag list into a Google Sheet called OSS ALIU Red Flag Names PUBLIC.  It is this file that we will return to, again and again, to find more information about different networks contained in the Final Report.  This task needs to be performed only once.
(This Google sheet can be viewed by anyone with this link.)

2) filter for Voss (Data, Filter by Condition, Text contains "Voss") as shown above.

3) copy the results (which are all the Red Flag texts in which Voss is mentioned) to another sheet, named, for example, "Voss Network"

4) Format the "Voss Network" sheet (so that it can be loaded and analysed in Google Fusion Tables)

Sheet AFTER formatting: Name1 and Name2 are linked in the network

Note: We format the data only after having gathered it all together. 

4.1 Using the Sheets Data function, Split Text to columns, Use the "." as the Separator.

4.2 Add a column to the left .

4.3 For all the entries that mentioned Voss, copy "Voss, Dr Hermann" into the new column.
This is important for network analysis later, because it links Voss to the name of the Red Flag entry in which his name appears.

Note: the assumption is that the mention of Voss' name implies some kind of link to Voss. The exact nature of the link is specified in the text, which is information that we will exploit later using a different network analysis tool, but which we do not need at this stage in the analysis.


4.4  Name the columns (from Left to Right): Name1, Name2, Location, Role1, Role2, Role3...Role10

(Note: We format all the Sheets the same so that later we can mix selected files in Google Fusion Tables)

5) Load the Google Sheet "Voss Network" into Google Fusion Tables

(Note: If you have multiple sheets (tabs) you can select which one to load)

6) In Google Fusion tables, click on "Create Chart"./ Specify that the chart is for Name1, Name2

note! This will generate a circle with spokes in which  "Voss, Dr. Hermann" is in the centre with links to every Red Flag Name entry that mentioned him.

Try it!

How to add clusters to the network

To obtain the graph with several clusters at the beginning of this post, one inserts a step between 3) and 4). in which one adds the connections for some or all of the names whose entries mentioned Voss.

Before formatting the "Voss Network" Google Sheet, one returns to the OSS ALIU Red Flag Names PUBLIC Google Sheet and filters for Red Flag entries that mentioned Voss. Goepel is the first name on the list,.

Filter for Goepel and copy the result into the "Voss Network" Google Sheet, and repeats for the next name.

ALIU entries that mentioned Goepel are: Goeple, Wuester, Holzapfel, leegenhoek, Lefranc, Mandl, Block, and Cramer.  We can think of this as the "Goepel" cluster.

This will add to the Voss network, all the Red Flag entries that mentioned Goepel.




Once all the information one wants about Voss' contacts has been added, proceed to formatting, as described in step 4, then load in Google Fusion Tables

Note: Attention, in the column to the left (that will become Name1), one puts Goepel (or whatever name was filtered for)

Direct Links to Voss and Direct links to one of Voss' direct links, Goepel.
Note that the names appear exactly as they do in their ALIU entry, "Voss, Dr Hermann" and "Gopel, Dr Erhard".
We are careful to use the exact ALIU names so that they will match in network analysis.

This approach can be used for any set of links one wants to analyse, whether to a name of a person, a place, an organisation, an event,  a year or any word that appears in the ALIU Red Flag list.

Data, always in the same format, can be mixed and matched, a process we will show later.

Links to Datasets:

• ALIU Red Flag List published on lootedart.com

• OSS ALIU Red Flag Names PUBLIC Google Sheet

• Voss Network Google Sheet

• Voss Network Google Fusion Table (formatted sheet)

Considerations concerning the source

By necessity, important information will be missing from an operational report made under time constraints in difficult conditions.  We are, in using the information in the ALIU Red Flag List to map our networks, trusting the selection of information made by the OSS ALIU team.

Is there - should there be- a limit to this trust? What are the contours to the report's reliability? Are there blindspots we should be aware of? Omissions that should be compensated for by bringing in other sources? Attention to some areas that seems excessive?

For the time being we will acknowledge these questions and put them aside, for further exploration later. No source is perfect, and, at present, the 1946 ALIU Red Flag List, with all its imperfections, still seems to be the most useful primary historical source we have.

-------------
*Vossisk was picked up but is not a contact. (In addition, Voss had an entire detailed interrogation report (DIR) dedicated to him, but we are not using the detailed report, only the summary of Red Flag names in the Final Report.)

Disambiguating the Balls

Is it possible to mix URIs from many sources and obtain something intelligible?
https://tb.semlab.io/share/BALL

BALL, an art dealing family operating in Dresden, Berlin, Paris, New York 

see: Firma Hermann Ball, Firma Ball, Graupe und Ball, A & R Ball, Hermann Ball, Alexander Ball, Richard Ball  

Hermann (Hirsch) Ball (1857 - 1924) and his sons Richard (born 1892) and Alexander operated an art dealership in Dresden, specializing in old masters, furniture and porcelain. The Firma Ball was registered in the Dresden Business Register in 1903 by Hermann Ball. His sons Richard and Alexander Ball joined the business in 1919.*

Alexander Ball, as noted in a previous post, was flagged by the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit in 1946 for having working closely with notorious art looter Karl Haberstock during the Nazi era.

Yet it is difficult to find out much about him.

Born in Germany, Alexander Ball (also known as Alexandre Ball, Alex Ball or A. Ball) worked in France, before escaping to the USA. In NY, he set up a dealership with his brother Richard Ball, known as  A. and R. Ball, (A&R Ball, A. & R. Ball, etc).

Archives and Wikipedia: can structured links help make resources easier to find?

Germany provides much interesting thinking on linking information. Below, Odendahl, posting on Open Edition, shares a suggestion for referencing archives on Wikipedia in an article entitled "Archivquellen einheitlich in der Wikipedia verlinken".  (click here for Google Translate).

We'd like, he says, to see our archives used.

Why not have an easy and yet rigorously formatted way to share archives?

The format that he suggests using in Wikipedia is:

{{Archivquelle
|sammlung=
|bestand=
|dossier=
|dokument=
|signatur=
|titel=
|datum=
|institution=
|link=
}}

It seems like this (or something like this) could be a very useful addition. 

Take, for example the International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property that is hosted by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).  

Wouldn't it be nice to have a Wikipedia (and this Wikidata and Dbpedia) for each archive referenced, along with direct links to the database on Wikipedia? It might make it easier for people who don't know about EHRI or the Portal to find the information, and there doesn't seem to be any downside.

(As of this writing the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure had a Wikidata ID but not yet a Wikipedia page.)

What do you think?