Exploring Artistic Production with the Artistic Network Toolbox (ANT)

FAIN: HAA-296281-24

Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)
Alexis Culotta (Project Director: June 2023 to present)
Aron Culotta (Co Project Director: November 2023 to present)

The creation of an open-source platform for network analysis of art and artists.

We seek Level II funding to develop the Artistic Network Toolbox (ANT), an open-source, user-friendly platform for scholars and students to curate, visualize, and share the relationships between art, its creators, and its contexts. While prior digital humanities projects have shown the value of network analysis to explore artistic production, doing so required expensive, one-off software development customized for each project. Instead, the goal of ANT is to democratize access to network analysis in art historical scholarship. To do so, ANT will leverage 100% open-source technologies, providing one-click generation of a fully-functional website with no programming expertise, and making database curation as simple as editing a spreadsheet. ANT will model diverse artistic connections in a dynamic network analysis that can be customized and visualized for nuanced explorations of artistic exchange.

Associated Products

Tulane professors awarded NEH grant to transform digital art history research (Blog Post)
Title: Tulane professors awarded NEH grant to transform digital art history research
Author: Tulane University School of Liberal Arts
Abstract: "Tulane School of Liberal Arts professor Alexis Culotta and School of Science and Engineering professor Aron Culotta have received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop an interactive platform for visualizing connections between artworks and artists. The project is one of only 15 such Digital Humanities Advancement grants awarded by the NEH in January 2024. The new tool, called the Artistic Network Toolbox (ANT), will allow researchers to upload datasets capturing relationships like apprenticeships, collaborations, and influences between artists or artworks. With a simple click, it will generate a customized website that supports exploratory network analysis of artistic production to investigate questions like how influential an artist was in the spread of a new style or technique."
Date: 02/22/2024
Primary URL: http://https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/newsletter/tulane-professors-awarded-neh-grant-transform-digital-art-history-research
Primary URL Description: Link to press release noting our NEH award for the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT) development.
Blog Title: "Tulane professors awarded NEH grant to transform digital art history research"
Website: Tulane School of Liberal Arts

SavingFaces: A Mapping and Investigation of the Renaissance Roman Frescoed Façade (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: SavingFaces: A Mapping and Investigation of the Renaissance Roman Frescoed Façade
Author: Alexis Culotta
Abstract: In this talk I framed my parallel work on the Renaissance Roman frescoed facade via the lens of our emerging Artistic Network Toolkit by demonstrating how these sites of artistic exchange along the streets of Renaissance Rome could be mapped and visualized anew via our toolkit's functions. Sharing our developments was crucial as our toolkit could be a viable means for the mapping of Rome that was the overall mission of the workshop gathering (and thus could be a point of collaboration in future).
Date: 06/13/2024
Primary URL: https://www.biblhertz.it/events/37654/2212
Primary URL Description: This link takes you to the listing for the event provided by the Biblioteca Hertziana; it also includes the program including full slate of speakers.
Conference Name: Towards a Novel Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome II" Workshop held at the Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome

New Technologies and Renaissance Studies I: Exploring Renaissance Art via the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT) (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: New Technologies and Renaissance Studies I: Exploring Renaissance Art via the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT)
Author: Alexis Culotta
Author: Aron Culotta
Abstract: A singular artwork can be a font for scholarly investigation, but more captivating can be the generative genealogy of an artwork often told through the relationships – apprenticeships, workshop circles, collaborations, patronage, and so on - that fed into its production. Such a network is most relevant for research into art history and the larger field of the humanities as it is often within these webs that new insights into artistic exchanges and decisions can be gleaned. This workshop introduces our Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT) that is under development thanks to a recent NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant and aims to provide scholars, students, and the general public an intuitive tool to visualize and explore these artistic relationships. Focusing specifically on Renaissance artistic applications given the nature of RSA’s convening, this workshop will demonstrate how our emerging open-source toolkit, built from a foundational prototype trained on the work produced by Raphael and his workshop network, allows users to easily transform Italian art datasets into customizable and collaborative visualizations that can in turn foster both micro-examination of works side-by-side and macro-examination of the social-cultural environment in which those works were cultivated. As part of the workshop, attendees will be invited to experiment with the emerging toolkit using their own data or with provided early modern datasets in the hope that it fosters a valuable dialogue on the use and viability of network analysis in the ever-growing field of digital art history/digital humanities.
Date: 03/20/2025
Primary URL: http://https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/8355
Primary URL Description: The URL provided above is to the conference program.

Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT): Democratizing Network Modeling in Art Historical Scholarship (Article)
Title: Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT): Democratizing Network Modeling in Art Historical Scholarship
Author: Alexis Culotta
Author: Aron Culotta
Abstract: Assessing the relationships between art objects with network visualizations bears the potential to yield new insights into creative exchanges between makers. Often limiting such mapping, however, are barriers to streamlined transformation of a dataset into a visualized network for analysis. Moreover, limitations on customization of and collaboration within the current tools available for researchers further diminish the potential for artistic network analysis to benefit art history. In this paper, we provide an overview of our solution to these challenges in the form of the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT) that allows users to easily transform their data into a customized and collaborative website in which artistic relationships can be explored. We provide a rationale for this project and its advances over prior work while also framing our goal in ANT’s creation to democratize access to such visualization tools, both in accessibility to a wide array of users and in its compatibility with a global repertoire of art historical data. To that end, we point to this potential with some preliminary assessment of ANT’s functionalities using our emerging artistic datasets. The ANT open-source library is available at thttps://github.com/tapilab/ant.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
Primary URL Description: This article was accepted for publication in January 2025 for a forthcoming edition of the journal.
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Publisher: Digital Humanities Quarterly

A DIGITAL TOOL FOR ANALYZING ARTISTIC NETWORKS (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A DIGITAL TOOL FOR ANALYZING ARTISTIC NETWORKS
Author: Alexis Culotta
Author: Aron Culotta
Author: Aine Powers
Author: Rae Stevenson
Author: Sydney Feldman
Abstract: An artwork’s creation is often told through relationships – apprenticeships, collaborations, patronage, etc. – that mandate both micro-examination of works side-by-side and macro-examination of the social-cultural environment. For example, the complicated networks of artistic workshop practice and how they produce artistic innovations are active areas of research; however, such investigations are limited by the difficulty of synthesizing a workshop’s corpus and navigating between visual objects, their creators, and their liaisons. In response, we have created a digital humanities software library called the Artistic Network Toolbox (ANT), which enhances historical studies using social network analysis and visualization. ANT provides scholars, students, and the general public with an intuitive tool to visualize and explore artistic relationships while modeling further investigations across the arts and humanities. Critically, the library allows users to easily import their own data to create a customized visualization website, thereby democratizing access to advanced visualizations for exploring artistic creation. ANT is an open source library that supports three steps: (1) the user specifies artistic data and relationships in an intuitive format using Google Sheets; (2) the tool generates a customizable website based on the entered data; (3) the user is provided with interactive network visualizations and search features to support rich querying and exploration of the data. We have worked with scholars across areas to create ANT visualizations for three areas: Raphael’s Roman workshop; 16th to 18th-century Chinese export wares; and art of the Viceregal Americas. This presentation will describe the results of these case studies, the feedback from scholars in the field, and future work to expand the scope and utility of ANT. This project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under Digital Humanities Advancement Grant #HAA-296281-24, by Tulane
Date: 4/10/25
Primary URL: http://https://research.tulane.edu/trics
Primary URL Description: This is a link to the Tulane Research, Innovation, and Creativity Summit (TRICs) of which this poster presentation, led by our RAs, will be a part.
Conference Name: Tulane Research, Innovation, and Creativity Summit (TRICS)

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