Fall 2016 Public Lecture

Thursday, November 10

Matthew Lincoln, Getty Research Institute
“Computing with Genre in Paintings, Prints, and Purchases: Questions of Category and Measure”

Visualization of the distribution of still life paintings by Floris van Dijck in a multidimensional space defined by hand-coded visual motifs.

Visualization of the distribution of still life paintings by Floris van Dijck in a multidimensional space defined by hand-coded visual motifs. Courtesy of Matthew Lincoln.

Thursday, November 10 at 6 PM
Oxford Road Building Presentation Room

A great deal of art historical work has been, and remains today, constructing systems for organizing knowledge, from catalogues raisonné, collection inventories, and art dealer stocklists, to slide libraries and digital collections. This talk explores one of the foundational knowledge categories in art history – that of genre – from three different periods and perspectives. Using a variety of computational techniques, I explore what new questions a macro-scale view of this problematic category allows us to ask, and how even broken results from biased data can be valuable additions to our work.

Matthew Lincoln is a Data Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where he focuses on data-driven research into the history of the art market. He earned his PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016, using computational analysis to study networks of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish printmaking. Lincoln has previously worked as a curatorial fellow with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and as a graduate assistant in the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture in the University of Maryland’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. He has also been a recipient of Kress and Getty Foundation grants for their summer institutes in digital art history, and served on the steering committee for the Kress and Getty-funded symposium Art History in Digital Dimensions at the University of Maryland in October 2016. In addition to conference papers at ADHO’s annual meeting, the College Art Association, and the Renaissance Society of America, Lincoln has also published research in the International Journal for Digital Art History, British Art Studies, andPerspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art.

Lecture sponsored by the Art History Endowed Lectureship.

For more information: 404.727.6282 or www.arthistory.emory.edu.