Visualizing Art Historical Developments using the Getty ULAN, Wikipedia and Wikidata

Graphical representations of art historical developments have a long tradition in scholarly communication and education. The recent availability of openly accessible, domain specific data sources invites to explore the possibility of creating such diagrams by automatic means in order to support research as well as navigation through extensive art collections online. Following this approach, our work uses data from the Getty Union List of Artist Names, Wikidata and DBpedia to create large scale network visualizations of a) historical artist networks and b) bi-partite networks of persons and art/architecture styles. We describe technical issues regarding data processing, discuss the resulting visualizations in light of their historic predecessors and show how they can be used to compare related data collections of differing provenance.