The Art of Relations

This abstract explores the application of network science and computational methods in the field of art history, using Giorgio Vasari's "The Lives of the Artists" as a case study. The goal is to extract a social network from this magnum opus in order to understand the social dynamics and collaborations among artists during the Italian Renaissance through computational methods. The methodology involves data mining and natural language processing techniques to identify references to individuals and their co-occurrences in the text, which are then used to construct a social network. The resulting network can be analyzed to identify central figures, artist clusters, and temporal changes in relationships. The abstract proposes also a further enhancement of this literary network by leveraging Knowledge Extraction techniques and Linked Open Data to convert this book into a Knowledge Graph which can be queried and explored with Semantic Web methodologies.