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

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