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
- 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 [↩]
- 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/ [↩]