Art History on Wikipedia, a Macroscopic Observation

TL;DR

This study analyzes the link structure of art historical articles on Wikipedia, using the ULAN database and VIAF mappings to identify relevant actors and reveal insights into how art history is represented online.

Contribution

It introduces a method to map art historical actors on Wikipedia using ULAN and VIAF, providing a macroscopic view of the domain-specific link structure.

Findings

Reveals the high-level structure of art historical knowledge on Wikipedia

Identifies 18,002 relevant art historical person articles

Provides insights into the interconnectedness of art historical actors

Abstract

How are articles about art historical actors interlinked within Wikipedia? Lead by this question, we seek an overview on the link structure of a domain specific subset of Wikipedia articles. We use an established domain-specific person name authority, the Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), in order to externally identify relevant actors. Besides containing consistent biographical person data, this database also provides associative relationships between its person records, serving as a reference link structure for comparison. As a first step, we use mappings between the ULAN and English Dbpedia provided by the Virtual Internet Authority File (VIAF). This way, we are able to identify 18,002 relevant person articles. Examining the link structure between these resources reveals interesting insight about the high level structure of art historical knowledge as it is represented on Wikipedia.