Session:<\/strong> Networks and Spatial Analysis<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keywords:<\/strong> Geospatial network; network visualization; kinship model; art market; Amsterdam<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sudden, meteoric rise of Dutch economic power in the late sixteenth century concurred with the surprising flowering of Dutch art [and the rapid growth of the art market.] In Amsterdam, the large local market and the manifold international trade links nurtured an expanding artist community \u2014 over a thousand painters lived and worked there between 1585 and 1700 and pushed the city to its pinnacle of painting production. These Amsterdam artists have attracted many scholars to study their lives and social relations in conjunction with their works. However, the small-scale, art-historical research cannot provide a holistic view of the painter community and their social bonds at large, and therefore the questions of where the seventeenth-century painters lived within the city and how they were connected through family or social ties still go unanswered. Data<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The main source is the ECARTICO database, which is built on a wealth of archival sources\u00a0 and literature, providing a comprehensive collection of structured biographical data concerning\u00a0the \u2018cultural industries\u2019 of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.\u00a0 ECARTICO contains data on 50,412 persons with 9219 painters in its collection (as of February 14,\u00a0 2020). In particular, ECARTICO documents more than 30,000 relations and contains over 9000\u00a0 addresses, an abundance of social and locational information that has yet been used in existing\u00a0 research. As a case study, I experimented with the 129 painters who became active in Amsterdam\u00a0 between 1585 and 1610.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Method\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Remodeling family relationships\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I first modified the tree-structured family ties into a kinship network by adding the missing\u00a0 links among the family members. Siblings, half-siblings, and in-laws are calculated or inferred from\u00a0 the existing relational data in order to complete the family network that matters for small family\u00a0 businesses in the early modern time. This method, albeit simple, can help transform many\u00a0 biographical databases to fit the historical network analysis without altering the original data. In\u00a0 this way, more biographical and genealogical databases will become suitable for network analysis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Folding social network spatially\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To map the social network with intermediate nodes falling outside the city, I introduced a\u00a0 method that folds up the social network spatially. Figure 1 illustrates a network with painters who\u00a0 can be geo-coded (in red) and intermediate people who cannot be mapped (in dark gray). The size\u00a0 of the nodes is proportional to the number of connections he\/she had (or the degrees) in the\u00a0 original network. The distance between any two adjacent nodes is marked as one in the original\u00a0 network. Then, the intermediaries are dropped, and the distance between the two geo-coded\u00a0 nodes in the original network becomes the weight of the new direct link between the two. In the\u00a0 folded network, for instance, node A and C are now linked with a weight of 3, indicating a much\u00a0 more distant relation than node A and B, who have a direct connection with a weight of 1. In this\u00a0 way, the social network of painters in Amsterdam can be layered over the maps without losing the\u00a0 shape of the original network. Figure 1 shows an example of visualizing social connections among\u00a0 painters and art dealers in Amsterdam between 1605-1610.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Results and discussion <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first set out to map artists and their social relations in Amsterdam, I expected to find clusters of socially-bonded painters scattered in various locations with only few brokerage ties connecting groups that are both socially and spatially demarcated. Nevertheless, Figure 1 presents an integrated painters\u2019 community regardless of their places of residence. The painters\u2019 circle, as we see on the map, leaned towards the east side of the city, on Sint Antonisbreestraat, where a new artistic cluster was burgeoning (blue circle). The artists who settled there, according to the network in Figure 1, are among the best connected, and they seem to have been pulling the whole community to the newly developed area, an area that would soon become an artistic center in the city and which would house Rembrandt decades later. Through this exercise, I hope to showcase the potential of geospatial network representation, using the revised kinship model, to smooth scholarly reading of the maps and to derive a historical narrative at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Works cited\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Goosens, Marion E. W. 2012. De Noord-Nederlandse kunsthandel in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw. Uitgeverij Verloren. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mayr, Eva, and Florian Windhager. 2018. \u201cOnce upon a Spacetime: Visual Storytelling in Cognitive and Geotemporal Information Spaces.\u201d ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 7 (3): 96. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/ijgi7030096<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n White, Douglas R., Vladimir Batagelj, and Andrej Mrvar. 2016. \u201cAnthropology: Analyzing Large Kinship and Marriage Networks With Pgraph and Pajek.\u201d Social Science Computer Review, August. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/089443939901700302<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Weixuan Li Time and Place: Thursday, 01.07., 13:50\u201314:10, Room 1Session: Networks and Spatial Analysis Keywords: Geospatial network; network visualization; kinship model; art market; Amsterdam The sudden, meteoric rise of Dutch economic power in the late sixteenth century concurred with the surprising flowering of Dutch art [and the rapid growth of the art market.] In Amsterdam, the large local market and the<\/p>\n
In recent years, the advent of ECARTICO \u2014 a biographical database concerning artists in early modern Low Countries \u2014 provides an opportunity to bring our understanding of painters\u2019 milieu in Amsterdam to scale, for it systematically documents family ties together with various professional and social relationships. However, to illustrates the social and artistic milieu in Amsterdam using this database, one is inevitably confronted with two challenges. First, like many genealogical databases, ECARTICO records kinship in a tree-structured hierarchy, lacking direct connections among siblings and in-laws (White, Batagelj, and Mrvar 2016). The genealogical kinship model, although suiting studies in anthropology and genealogy, misleads the social economic inquiries into ties of kindred, as the early modern small businesses like a painter\u2019s workshop often involved the extended family (Goosens 2012). Furthermore, ECARTICO\u2019s kinship hierarchy currently intermingles with the flat network of professional relationships, making a family member even more distant than a client in its network.
The second challenge concerns visualizing the social relations within the urban context to highlight spatial patterns. Most network visualizations in (art) historical research did not involve space, presumably because some nodes in the network have no known location or have locations outside the scope. In the case of painters in Amsterdam, some of them are connected through an intermediary painter living in another city.
To tackle these problems and to visualize painters\u2019 social milieu on the map using ECARTICO, I first revised the existing relational model in the biographical databases, turning the tree-structured hierarchy into a network. On top of the kinship remodeling, I further propounded a spatial configuration that folds networks in space, transforming the relational web into a social distance matrix that can be plotted onto the map. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hnr2021.historicalnetworkresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Graphik-Amsterdam-1.jpg\")
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