Tracking Looted Art with Knowledge Graphs: A Wikidata Case Study

Art looting networks operate on many levels, many of them hidden, over long periods of time. The native graph function of Wikidata enhanced by federated queries can help track them.

Tracking Looted Art with Graphs

April 9, 2022, Laurel Zuckerman

Graphs and Networks in the Humanities 2022 Technologies, Models, Analyses, and Visualizations

6th International Conference, 3. – 4. February 2022, Online

The 6th international conference on Graphs and Networks in the Humanities took place from Thursday 3. February to Friday 4. February 2022 online, co-organized by scholars from the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, Vienna University, University of Leipzig, and the University Ca’ Foscari Venice

Paper: Tracking Looted Art with Graphs: A Case Study 

See also:

The Error is the Message: Extracting Insights from Deceptive Data for Nazi looted art

The Knowledge Graph Conference, 2023

VIDEO: 

https://youtu.be/WBMpZ3NDNRQ?si=wsFtV9wzBEghCSoB

Tracking Looted Art 2: Sothebys Sales of Restituted Artworks as Data

The provenances of artworks restituted to Jewish families  plundered by Nazis contain valuable information for the art historian and Holocaust scholar.

Questions:

• Which transactions occur between the seizure/sale under the Nazis and the restitution?
• Which names appear in these transactions?
• How often do they appear?

Part of the series:  Tracking Nazi-looted art dealers: Restitutions as data

This post looks a a simple method for identifying the names of these buyers and sellers for further analysis. In this example, we look at the provenances of artworks sold at Sothebys after they were restituted to their original owners or their heirs.