In my talk I will present aspects of my research dealing with the quantitative analysis and visualization of networks of relationships between art-historical actors. Motivated by classical scholarly approaches to quantify and visualize (art) historical developments, my work explores the applicability of digital approaches using publicly available, sometimes crowd-sourced, cultural datasets to step into the footsteps of these individual historical endeavours. Results indicate that, comparable to the historic examples, data based approaches are always subject to cultural bias, although the combination of different data sources might eventually yield a more objective view on global cultural dynamics.