On the 22nd of September 2020 the DAD team met with Christian Huemer and Johanna Aufreiter from the Belvedere Research Center to discuss our results concerning Belvedere’s online collection. One focus of the meeting was our engagement with the room on “Viennese Portraiture in the Biedermeier Period” in Belvedere’s permanent exhibition.
Applying our algorithm to find pathways of semantic meaning [Flexer 2020] between works of art, we are able to suggest additional works for the liminal spaces between individiual positions in the curatorial narrative, opening up new sub-narratives for the room. Based on a word embedding [Mikolov et al 2013] of the keywords associated with the paintings, our algorithm suggests works of art which follow a pathway between the respective semantic meanings. Moreover we are able to further constrain our liminal curation by requiring all art works to fit an additional overall topic chosen by a human curator, again translated to the language of Belvedere’s keyword system via word embedding. As an example see a “Gender” constraint applied to the Biedermeier room.
A conceivable outcome is a revision of the Biedermeier room achieved via a joint curation of human and machine. This, as well as other approaches towards the Belvedere collection, will be the center of further exchange between DAD and the Belvedere.
All depicted paintings in this blog post by Belvedere, Vienna, Austria (CC BY-SA 4.0).