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Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations

by Jaap Geraerts, Henry Keazor, Demival Vasques Filho, Rebecca Welkens and Thorsten Wübbena

“Members are obliged to keep the Association’s printed matter carefully and secretly. They also undertake to return all printed matter to the Executive Board if they leave the Association and to ensure that the printed matter is returned to the Executive Board in the event of their death.”1

This clear call for secrecy and discretion can be found as a kind of prologue in issues of the so-called ‘Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes’, which were published from 1899 to 1939.2 They were distributed by the “International Association of Museum Officials in Defence Against Counterfeiting and Improper Trade Practices” (“Internationaler Verband von Museumsbeamten zur Abwehr von Fälschungen und unlauterem Geschäftsgebaren”). The project “Forgeries and Networks (ForNet) – The Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes and forgery networks in the 20th century”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), will use this valuable source to reconstruct, visualise and analyse the networks of relationships and the strategies of the actors involved at the time as well as the routes taken by the forgeries and ensure that the data compiled in the project is made available to the public. This blog post, highlights the creation of the dataset, its transformations and ingest in a graph database, and the creation of networks, as a step towards answering the project’s research questions. „Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations“ weiterlesen

  1. The original text reads as follows: “[…] sind die Mitglieder verpflichtet, die Drucksachen des Verbandes sorgfältig und geheim aufzubewahren. Sie verpflichten sich ferner, im Falle ihres Ausscheidens aus dem Verband die sämtlichen Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückzugeben, sowie dafür Sorge zu tragen, daß im Falle ihres Todes die Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückgegeben werden.”, example: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.35249#0070 []
  2. Available as a digital copy at Heidelberg University Library, https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.33011, based on the collection held in the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/kunstbibliothek/home/ []

Priests’ libraries – Part 2: making our data operable

by Jaap Geraerts and Teresa Wendel

In a previous blog post that appeared almost three years ago (tempus fugit!), I introduced a small (pilot) project on priests’ libraries from the early modern Dutch Republic. Since then, a lot has happened – in general, but also in relation to this project. Apart from the publication of a chapter in an edited volume on this topic, two research assistants, Sarah Büttner and Teresa Wendel, have patiently and conscientiously identified (most of) the books mentioned in the inventories that form the basis of this project and linked them, whenever possible, to records in online catalogues. Moreover, the latter has created a data model that we developed further in an iterative manner. Ultimately, this data model makes it possible to discern trends within individual libraries and across them, thus furthering our knowledge of the intellectual and pastoral formation of priests serving in the Holland Mission (the Catholic mission in the Dutch Republic), among other topics. This blog post will offer a glimpse of the process of developing a data model and making our data operable in a graph database.

„Priests’ libraries – Part 2: making our data operable“ weiterlesen