The Façade of Neutrality: Unearthing Hidden Histories in the Montias Database with Digital Methodologies

Abstract

Technological innovations and the 2020 global pandemic have increased scholarly interactions with and reliance on digital resources, leading cultural heritage institutions to prioritize initiatives that digitize and organize their collections online, aiding in their accessibility to a wider global audience. Focusing on the Montias Database of 17th Century Art Inventories, this article turns a critical eye toward digitized art-historical data that is collected, preserved, and organized by cultural heritage institutions. Using the digital art history project “Beyond ‘Exceptional’: Reassessing Women’s Participation in the Cultural Sphere of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam with Digital Social Network Analysis,” I demonstrate the potential of computational methods for mediating the biases inherent to these collections.

Connecting (described) Fibers: Controlled Vocabularies of Global Textiles

“…The absence of Dutch trade textiles from the AAT is not necessarily surprising, as textile research has been marginalized in broader art history until recently. 9 The AAT's baseline came from the art historical foundations in archives, largely focused on references to European Old Master paintings (Renaissance though modern), for which documentation has been fairly standardized since the inception of art history in the nineteenth century. The ways materials-particularly more industrial materials-were documented was less consistent.…”