Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT): Democratizing Network Modeling in Art Historical Scholarship

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 https://github.com/tapilab/ant.