Juan Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho, Javier de la Rosajsuarez@uwo.ca, fsancho@us.es, jdelaros@uwo.ca

A Digital Geography of

Hispanic Baroque Art

Overview Conceptual Problems Source of data Methodology Elements for a Digital Geography of the Hispanic

Baroque: Cultural Communities; Semantic Maps; Cultural Areas; Diversity; Flows

Conclusions and Further Research

Conceptual Problems: Toward a Geography of Art

• In Toward a Geography of Art, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, stated that his research would “investigate how notions of place, of the geographical, have been inflected into writing about change through time as it has been and is still discussed in art history” (DaCosta 2004).

• The Catalogue of the 2010-2011 international exhibition Painting of the Kingdoms:• political geography and artistic geography do not coincide as

countries, viceroyalties, native areas, and notions of center and periphery superpose one another in different research works and cataloguing efforts.

• the need of a theory of diffusion that help explain the movements of creators, paintings and features from territory to territory and the effects that this transfers have in the spatial organization of art that experts carry out.

• Painting of the Kingdoms: Elliott, Da Costa, Gutiérrez Haces, Brown

Space and Cultural Complexity

• The Hispanic Baroque: Cultural Complexity• diverse agents, connectivity, non-linear and meaningful

interactions, adaptive and rule based behaviors• self-organization, emergence levels, phase transitions, large

events, novelty, path-dependence• Culture defined as information that affects humans’ behavior and

represented here by the case of Hispanic Baroque paintings

• We argue that the study of large-scale cultural systems such as the Hispanic Baroque is better tackled by a combination of tools and concepts that deal with the complex and evolving nature of the system and can be studied it through multi-scale, data mining and visualization techniques that reduce that complexity to a minimum, offering new ways of arranging the space in which that system unfolded over time.

The “Lived Spaces” of Hispanic Baroque Paintings• “Spatiality [i.e. Socially produced space] is a substantiated and

recognizable social product, part of a ‘second nature’, [the transformed and socially concretized spatiality arising from the application of purposeful human labor] which incorporates as it socializes and transforms both physical and psychological spaces.” (Soja 1996)

• The Lived Spaces of Art as Third Spaces of Cultural Transitions• Multiple power structures• Localities over time• Activation of cultural works

• New Localities, New Meanings, New Representations• The Digital and The Complex: discovery and representation

A Digital Geography of Hispanic Baroque Art

• A Digital Geography of Art encompasses the various possible organizations of the place of art (the “lived spaces”) by digital means in a manner that relates different types of connected data about authors and artworks to different notions of space, and to a variety of problems about human culture.

Source of Data• Classical Relational Database• Web based interface:

http://baroqueart.cultureplex.ca

~ 100,000 topics~ 13,000 artworks (16th-19th century)~ 1,500 creators ~ 400 series~ 200 schools ~ 2,500 geographical locations~ 75,000 atomic descriptions

Methodology

• Storing semantic information– Ad-hoc descriptors– Formal ontology:

http://ontologies.cultureplex.ca

Methodology

Focus on descriptors, artworks, and authors Using descriptors, give a similarity measure

between artworks...o ... allowing to classify artworks on similarity classeso ... (duality) and obtaining relations for descriptors

Analyze the evolution of these classes over time, and in different spaces

Methodology

• Similarity Measure: S(Art1,Art2)=#{common descriptors of Art1 and Art2}

Artwork 1

Artwork 2

Descriptor 1

Descriptor 5

Descriptor 4

Descriptor 2

Descriptor 7

Descriptor 6

S=2

Elements for a Digital Geography of the Hispanic

Baroque Cultural Communities Semantic Maps Cultural Areas Diversity Flows

Cultural Communities:

Clustering & Visualizations (Raw Graphs)

• Layout algorithms (Gephi): Philogeny3D, OpenOrd, Yifan

Hu & Force Atlas• Analysis of modularity classes:

Only those that represent at least 1% of the total nodes

• Connectivity filtering:Degree range > 4

• Partition and colouring

• Culture as distribution of information in a group (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004)

• Koiné as leveler in New Spain painting (Gutiérrez Haces 2008)

http://zoom.it/vJVw#full

Cultural Communities:

Clustering & Visualizations (Raw Graphs)

• Franco Moretti (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 14) says that genres are “temporary structures”, “morphological arrangements that last in time, but always only for some time”.

• They look at the same time toward History and Form: we propose that the most efficient way to represent them is through a semantic organization that includes the features in a such a dynamic way that gets the best of an ontology that lives in a graph.

• The Catalogue of Paintings of the Kingdoms: • how to measure shared identities • how to compare schools, authors, features• how to track trajectories and flows

Semantic Maps vs Genres

Semantic Maps vs Genres:

Clustering & Visualizations

• Using main descriptors (more frequent and/or by types): Religious, Civil, Portrait, Saint, Virgin & Christ

• Project similarity classes in a 2D space using an MDS-like algorithm

• For every descriptor, create a potential surface using the elements of the above-mentioned distribution as focal points

• Establish a threshold to bound the surface for each descriptor

Cultural Areas

• A cultural area is a virtual or concrete

space organized through the same

information technology and a flow of

common culture shared in different

degrees by a population.

Cultural Areas and Similarities:

1650-1750

1550-1650 1750-1850

Cultural Areas as “Territorial Insertions”

• Mexico, Peru and Spain, as

countries

• Different Territories

• New Spain and Peru as

Viceroyalties

“territorial insertions […] do not necessarily entail subsumption under exclusive state authority because they are predicated on specific denationalization in laws and policy in the service of a global regime” (Sassen, 2006, 418)

“[these processes of globalization] are multisided, transboundary networks and formations which can include normative orders; they connect subnational or ‘national’ processes, institutions and actors, but not necessarily through the formal interstate system” (Sassen, 2006, 3)

Cultural Areas and Territories: Mexico

1750-1775

Cultural Areas and Territories: Oaxaca

1750-1775

Cultural Areas and Viceroyalties: New Spain and

Peru 1550-1650

New Spain and Peru Peru (without Anonymous, special attention to Bitti)

Diversity

• Bar-Yam: local variety and the

appropriate scale to study a problem

• Diversity and complexity (Scott Page)

• Contexts of Art History: creation, change

and diffusion

Diversity: Cultural Areas and Creators

1550-1650

Diversity: Cultural Areas and

Creators

1650-1750

Diversity: Cultural Areas and

Creators

1750-1850

Diversity and Search

Quispe Tito, 1625-1650 (10.3%)

Diversity and Search

Quispe Tito, 1625-1650 (10.3%); with labels

Flows

• From Braudel to David Christian

• Origin and Present Locations of Hispanic Baroque

Painting

• The Sack of Latin America (Báez)?, New Colonialism?

or Where Does Art Belong?

• Museums of the 20th Century

• A new History of Art

• The Locality of Art and Postmodern Geographies

Flows and Transmission

• “The Baroque means many different things even across the visual

cultures of western Europe, depending on the date and the character of

the work of art under consideration. There is no convincing Baroque

Zeitgeist, in the fullest sense, argued by the great cultural historian Jakob

Burckhardt, nor does Wölfflin’s model of the Baroque —as a reaction

against Renaissance— always apply. We present the Baroque as a

complex stage in the development of the post-Renaissance classical

language of design and we explore it through themes such as assemblage

and synthesis, the visual exploration of the physical space, the illusion of

movement and naturalistic ornament. Common to nearly all the works

of art discussed is that they result from the transmission of people,

ideas, motifs or materials” (emphasis ours).

Nigel Llewellyn in Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn, eds. Baroque 1620-1800. Style in the Age of

Magnificence. London V & A Publishing, 2009 (20).

Flows and Cultural Transfers:

Brown’s Triptych of Spanish Baroque

Painting • The Spanish Monarchy as a Cultural Area:

• Low Countries & Italy / Spain / Mexico (New Spain) / Peru

1650-1750

1550-1650 1750-1850

Flows and Cultural Transfers:

Brown’s Triptych of Spanish Baroque

Painting

Flows: Long-Durée and Big History

Conclusions

Conclusions and Further Work

Enrich the descriptors annotation to address

more specific questions on subsets of artworks

(add iconography)

Improve the Similarity Measures

Extend Semantic Maps to Evolutionary

Semantic Maps

Use Formal Concept Analysis for semantic

classification

Questions?

Juan Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho, Javier de la

Rosa

jsuarez@uwo.ca , fsancho@us.es,

jdelaros@uwo.ca

CulturePlex Lab:

http://www.cultureplex.ca

Thank you!