2025/01/01 by Claire Dupin de Beyssat · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Wikis in Education and Collaboration #Art History and Market Analysis #Digital Humanities and Scholarship
paper · pdf · doi:10.5334/johd.399
This article presents a historiographical investigation of nineteenth-century French art using Wikidata. It draws on a dataset of over 12,000 artists who exhibited at the Paris Salon between 1848 and 1880, each identified and, where possible, aligned with Wikidata entries. This alignment allows for both a quantitative analysis of artists’ posthumous visibility–assessing their presence in Wikidata and the completeness of their entries–and a qualitative evaluation of the data itself. Using OpenRefine, Wikidata entries were compared with specialized sources such as the Getty Research Institute’s Union List of Artist Names, providing insight into the reliability of basic biographical information and the broader documentation available. The dataset was then subjected to ordinal regressions to identify the factors and criteria influencing whether an artist is documented on Wikidata, as well as the quantity and quality of this documentation. Three key patterns emerge: first, women artists remain largely invisible in historiography, reflecting the professional and institutional barriers they faced during their lifetimes. Second, artists highly recognized in their own time tend to maintain substantial posthumous documentation, showing the durability of reputations and the traces historians rely upon. Third, association with modernity is a particularly strong factor in ensuring posthumous recognition, confirming the influence of a modernist paradigm in nineteenth-century art history. By precisely objectifying these historiographical biases, this study aims to encourage further research that challenges the canonical narratives of art history and supports the emergence of new perspectives and interpretations.