Data overview
Historians
Keepers
Places
About
“Research has formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
Where is the intellectual heritage of Italian art historians, and why?
It was just a matter of curiosity. We found out later that someone seems underrepresented and some cities are overlooked.
Even if the "why" is out of scope, we will try to show the "what".
If you are interested, scroll down and come with us to explore Italy across its cultural Institutions!
ITArtHistorians (ITAH) proposes an analysis on art historians and the cultural institutions ("keepers") which preserve their collections.
Our data sample is composed by the Italian art historians recorded in Dictionary of Art Historians and ArtChives.
The Dictionary of Art Historians is a free, privately funded biographical dictionary of historians of western art written and maintained by scholars, while ArtChives
collects detailed archival descriptions of notable art historians' collections.
Finally, we integrated the extracted information through Wikidata, one of the most famous collaborative and open source databases.
The workflow
The project workflow was articulated in four different phases:
the data cleaning and access, for which some data have been integrated automatically and manually,
enriching the original database; the data analysis, where some patterns were found and exposed in the data visualisation process,
finally integrated and presented in the digital communication phase.
It is important to clarify that our analysis is limited to our data, so as our conclusions.
You can find the cleaning and analysis phases on our Jupyter Notebook.
Research questions
We started our data collection from some questions:
- What is the distribution of the keepers in Italy?
- What is the role and the consequences of the digital technologies with respect to the Italian archival world?
- Is there a correlation between the kind of keepers and the historians’ collections they conserve?
Queries
We divided our queries into three macro-sections to better manage our analysis:
Database overview
Firstly we investigated our database through some queries, obtaining some descriptive data as a starting point of our reflections.
Historians and keepers
Then, we find out some queries to analyse the relationship between our historians and the keepers that preserve their collections.
Keepers instances and temporal analysis
Finally, we took into consideration the type of keepers and the timespan of historians' lives, exploring a possible correlation.
Database overview
Keepers' distribution
The following interactive map shows the keeper's distribution over the Italian territory.
- The most frequent places are Florence, Milan, Rome, Siena and Bologna.
- It seems that cities in the South of Italy are not as relevant as the cities in the North in the conservation of cultural heritage left by Italian art Historians.
Overall view of the places in terms of frequency
The Word cloud shows an overall view of the places based on frequency featured in our dataset.
- The most frequent place where historians were born is Florence
- The most frequent place where historians died is Rome
- The most frequent place where keepers are located is Milan
Most frequent birth places of Italian Historians
The following two visualisations represent in a different and more intuitive way some of the data collected featured in the previous Word cloud.
- Considering the first nine places in terms of frequency, no cities in the South of Italy are included.
- Our dataset strongly lacks historians who were born or died in the South of Italy.
Most frequent death places of Italian Historians
Number of historians' collections held by the cultural heritage institutions
It is interesting to notice some different phenomena according to this Barchart:
- The keeper owning the biggest number of collections is a digital library
- One of the two second keepers according to the highest number of collections owned is a foreign keeper
- The keepers that preserve multiple historians' collections are few: the dataset mainly consists of many local keepers owning a single historian's collection.
While the first two statements will be commented later, as a result of the last one we can argue that the conservation of Italian historians’ collections is fragmented along the entire territory without a strong central institution.
Numerical comparison between female art historians and male art historians
Even if the results of the following chart was quite predictable, we wanted to underline the crushing difference between males and females in the dataset, also considering its limited extend.
Historians and keepers
Correlation between historians' birth and death places and keepers locations
The following pie chart shows:
- The place where a historian died is the more relevant aspect to consider with regard to the keeper's location.
- The place where a historian born is the less relevant aspect to consider with regard to the keeper's location.
The first statement could confirm the idea that the collections were not physically moved and stayed where they were left by historians after dying.
Most frequent places where birth places of historians and keepers locations match
The column chart shows that:
- Florence is the place with the highest density ration between historians who were born in the city and historians's collections actually conserved in the city itself.
Comparison of the number of historians' collections preserved in Milan, Rome and Firenze, where historians who were born, died or neither
This line chart takes the most relevant cities revealed by the previous visualisations and explores them deeper:
- Milan is the city with the highest number of conserved historians who were neither born nor died there
- Florence and Rome have different features as they mostly conserve historians who were either born or died in the city.
Infogram
Number of historians neither born or dead in Milan that are conserved by Milan-based keepers
This chart explains better the previous one by showing which Milan-based keepers conserve historians neither were born nor died in Milan.
- The keeper that owns the highest number of historians who neither were born nor died in Milan is the BEIC Digital Library.
This leads us to understand the potential of digital libraries in terms of conserving historians' collections who died or were born in different places, by overcoming the physical limits.
We can also suppose that Milan is the main place where keepers are open to preserve collections regardless the birth place or death place of the historians.
Infogram
Locations of keepers owning collections of historians neither were born nor died there
In this column chart you can have a more overall view about the keepers that conserve historians neither were born nor died in their place where they are conserved. As you can see the predominance of Milan with the BEIC digital library is confirmed.
Keepers instances and temporal analysis
Frequency of keepers types
The following chart shows that:
- The most frequent types of keepers are archives, libraries and museums.
Number of historians's collections preserved by the five most frequent types of keepers throughout time (1400-1900)
The following charts show the role of the five most frequent types of keepers in conserving historians from a temporal point of view. Our temporal reference has been the timespan of the historians' lives. Since there was not a big difference between the graph considering the date of birth of the historians and the graph considering the date of death, we only kept the first one to avoid confusion.
We can see:
- Universities seem to preserve more collections of historians who were born between 1800 and 1900.
- The primacy of libraries and archives in charge of preserving the cultural heritage of historians who were born in the 1400 and 1500.
- Open-Access Publishers seem to preserve more collections of historians who were born between 1600 and 1900. The greatest growth is recorded in preserving historians who were born in 1900.
Number of historians for each type of keeper according to his/her birth or death place.
The following pie charts show the five most frequent types of keepers according to the historian's birthplace and deathplace: if they are equal to the keeper’s place or they are totally different. We can see:
- The primacy of libraries (12) in preserving historians who were born in the same place of the institution.
- The primacy of libraries (24) in preserving historians who died in the same place of the institution.
- The primacy of Open-Access Publishers (12) in preserving historians who neither were born nor died in the same place of the institution.
General conclusions
1. What is the distribution in the Italian territory of the keepers?
Many charts belonging to the Database Overview section of queries provide us with an answer to the first research question:
General predominance of the North of Italy
Our dataset seems to give keepers and cities in the North of Italy a position of predominance as they preserve more historians' collections.
Even the historians who were born or died in the North of Italy seems to be much more represented than the historians coming from the South. In fact, our dataset strongly lacks historians who were born or died in the South of Italy.
From one hand, it could be legible that cities with an active tradition of artists and historians such as Rome and Florence have a predominant position, but on the other hand, it cannot be denied that also cities like Naples and Palermo were important cultural spots in the past. Thus, it is unjustified that these cities are so underrepresented in our dataset. Furthermore, this is a huge problem for contemporary historians of art history who want to focus on the South of Italy as our dataset is not that helpful for them.
Geographical fragmentation of keepers
We can notice that besides institutions like Scuola Normale Superiore and Fondazione Federico Zeri most of the keepers conserve only one art historian’s collection. As a result, in Italy, the conservation of the cultural heritage left by art historians is very fragmented in the territory, without the presence of a strong central institution.
To conclude, the overral view of our dataset testifies how the Italian keepers are many and disseminated in the territory with few and all North and Central-baser important cities such as Florence, Rome and Bologna.
Possible developments: are we talking about discrimination?
Further developments are needed to have a better understanding of the phenomenon. In the meanwhile, we wondered some questions from which it would be interesting to go on:
Can it be that in the South of Italy were born fewer art historians?
Can it be that the collections of art historians coming from the South of Italy are not recorded online?
Can it be that there are fewer archives or collections left by Southern historians?
2: What is the role and the consequences of the digital technologies with respect to the Italian archival world?
Many of the charts belonging to the Historians and Keepers group of queries are useful to answer this research question:
Only one digital library among all keepers
Starting from our dataset, it seems that in Italy there is only a single digital library in charge of conserving art historians' collections: the BEIC Digital Library, based in Milan.
The BEIC digital library conserves the highest number of historians' collections (10) and Milan is the main city that own more historians who neither were born or died there.
The digital paradigm VS the physical paradigm
The data obtained lead us to reflect on the differences between the digital and the physical paradigm:
Where there is no digital keeper, the historians' collection are likely conserved in the same physical place where the historian either died or was born. Thus, the physical birthplace or deathplace plays a crucial role in deciding which keeper will own the collection. In particular, the results show how the place where a historian died is the more relevant aspect to consider with regard to the keeper's location.
The digital paradigm, instead, works differently breaking the physical limits. Indeed, it does not matter where the historian died or was born because their collection will be conserved by digital keepers which can have physical headquarters elsewhere.
Starting from our results, we can suppose that the Italian archival world is more rooted to the physical keepers than the digital ones to preserve the cultural heritage left by historians..
3: Is there a correlation between the kind of the keepers and the historians they conserve?
Finally, the charts belonging to the Keepers instances and temporal analysis are the most appropriate to explain the following general conclusions:
A possible correlation could be found
Even though further analysis should be done to have a sharped comprehension, the results seem to suggest that there could be a correlation between the kind of keeper and the historian's collection conserved.
Libraries and archives seem to follow the physical paradigm according to which they conserve historians who either were born or died in the place where the keeper is located.
The most frequent keepers for historians who neither were born nor died in their places are less conventional types of keepers such as open-access publishers, digital libraries or websites.
Libraries and archives are dominant in preserving the cultural heritage of historians who were born in the 1400 and 1500.
Universities seem to preserve more collections of historians who were born between 1800 and 1900.
Open-Access Publishers seem to preserve more collections of historians who were born between 1600 and, especially, 1900.
This leads us to recall the conclusions drawn from the second research question:
digital keepers (such as, in this case, websites and digital libraries) seem to be more devoted to own historians who do not have a geographical relation with them, so as to overcome the physical paradigm of conservation that instead rules the more “traditional” keepers (e.g., libraries and archives).
However, as we have said, the data are not enough to perform a sharper analysis and we think we cannot make any further statement about this topic.
So what?
Every solution starts from the analysis and awareness of the problem
On the basis of the results, we can offer some solutions:
- Provide databases that are more representative of Southern Italy art historians and keepers.
- Read more about the topic to understand why the cities of the south are neglected.
- Reinforce and update the digital archiving service to enable a wider accessibility and interoperability.
- Increase the number of digital libraries for a faster and centralized search.
Further readings:
"La storia negata. Napoli nella storiografia artistica".
Further readings:
"Digital Libraries in Open Education: The Italy Case".
"Condivisione e interoperabilità dei dati nel settore del patrimonio culturale: il caso delle banche dati digitali".
"Digital transformation in Italian cultural institutions: dynamics of strategic change and organizational co-evolution".
"Il Patrimonio Digitale della Cultura: un’opportunità di fruizione dei beni culturali “senza barriere”".
"Digital humanities and Commons: guidelines and recflections for a possible salvation".
Team
Alice Bordignon
Data accessa and cleaning, digital communication
Federico Cagnola
Data access and cleaning, data analysis