This document discusses developing a digital geography of Hispanic Baroque art through analyzing cultural communities, semantic maps, cultural areas, diversity, and flows of artworks. It describes collecting data on over 100,000 topics related to Hispanic Baroque artworks from the 16th to 19th centuries. Clustering and visualization techniques are used to analyze cultural communities and semantic relationships between descriptors. Cultural areas are examined across time periods and territories. Diversity is analyzed by cultural area, creator, and search terms. Flows of artworks and cultural transfers are also mapped across regions over time. Further work is needed to enrich descriptors, improve similarity measures, extend semantic maps longitudinally, and apply formal concept analysis.

1. A Digital Geography
of
Hispanic Baroque Art
Juan Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho, Javier de la Rosa
jsuarez@uwo.ca, fsancho@us.es, jdelaros@uwo.ca

2. Overview
Conceptual Problems
Source of data
Methodology
Elements for a Digital Geography of the Hispanic Baroque:
Cultural Communities; Semantic Maps; Cultural
Areas;Diversity; Flows
Conclusions and Further Research

3. Conceptual Problems:
Toward a Geography of Art
• In Toward a Geography of Art, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, stated that his research
would “investigate how notions of place, of the geographical, have been inflected into
writing about change through time as it has been and is still discussed in art history”
(DaCosta 2004).
• The Catalogue of the 2010-2011 international exhibition Painting of the Kingdoms:
• political geography and artistic geography do not coincide as countries,
viceroyalties, native areas, and notions of center and periphery superpose one
another in different research works and cataloguing efforts.
• the need of a theory of diffusion that help explain the movements of creators,
paintings and features from territory to territory and the effects that this transfers
have in the spatial organization of art that experts carry out.
• Painting of the Kingdoms: Elliott, Da Costa, GutiérrezHaces, Brown

4. Space and Cultural Complexity
• The Hispanic Baroque: Cultural Complexity
• diverse agents, connectivity, non-linear and meaningful interactions, adaptive and
rule based behaviors
• self-organization, emergence levels, phase transitions, large events, novelty, path-
dependence
• Culture defined as information that affects humans‟ behavior and represented here by
the case of Hispanic Baroque paintings
• We argue that the study of large-scale cultural systems such as the Hispanic Baroque is
better tackled by a combination of tools and concepts that deal with the complex and
evolving nature of the system and can be studied it through multi-scale, data mining
and visualization techniques that reduce that complexity to a minimum, offering new
ways of arranging the space in which that system unfolded over time.

5. The “Lived Spaces” of
Hispanic Baroque Paintings
• “Spatiality [i.e. Socially produced space] is a substantiated and recognizable social
product, part of a „second nature‟, [the transformed and socially concretized spatiality
arising from the application of purposeful human labor] which incorporates as it
socializes and transforms both physical and psychological spaces.” (Soja 1996)
• The Lived Spaces of Art as Third Spaces of Cultural Transitions
• Multiple power structures
• Localities over time
• Activation of cultural works
• New Localities, New Meanings, New Representations
• The Digital and The Complex: discovery and representation

6. A Digital Geography of
Hispanic Baroque Art
• A Digital Geography of Artencompasses the various
possible organizations of the place of art (the “lived spaces”)
by digital means in a manner that relates different types of
connected data about authors and artworks to different
notions of space, and to a variety of problems about human
culture.

7. Source of Data
• Classical Relational Database
• Web based interface: http://baroqueart.cultureplex.ca
~ 100,000 topics
~ 13,000 artworks (16th-19th century)
~ 1,500 creators
~ 400 series
~ 200 schools
~ 2,500 geographical locations
~ 75,000 atomic descriptions

8. Methodology
• Storing semantic information
– Ad-hoc descriptors
– Formal ontology:
http://ontologies.cultureplex.ca

9. Methodology
Focus on descriptors, artworks, and authors
Using descriptors, give a similarity measure between artworks...
o ... allowing to classify artworks on similarity classes
o ... (duality) and obtaining relations for descriptors
Analyze the evolution of these classes over time, and in
different spaces

10. Methodology
• Similarity Measure:
S(Art1,Art2)=#{common descriptors of Art1 and Art2}
Descriptor 2
Descriptor 6
Descriptor 1
S=2
Descriptor 7
Descriptor 4
Descriptor 5

11. Elements for a Digital Geography of
the Hispanic Baroque
Cultural Communities
Semantic Maps
Cultural Areas
Diversity
Flows

12. Cultural Communities:
Clustering & Visualizations (Raw Graphs)
• Layout algorithms (Gephi):
Philogeny3D, OpenOrd, YifanHu&
Force Atlas
• Analysis of modularity classes:
Only those that represent at least 1%
of the total nodes
• Connectivity filtering:
Degree range > 4
•Culture as distribution of information in a group
• Partition and colouring (Sperber&Hirschfeld, 2004)
•Koiné as leveler in New Spain painting (GutiérrezHaces 2008)

13. Cultural Communities:
Clustering & Visualizations (Raw Graphs)
http://zoom.it/vJVw#full

14. Semantic Maps vs Genres
•Franco Moretti (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 14) says that genres are “temporary
structures”, “morphological arrangements that last in time, but always only
for some time”.
•They look at the same time toward History and Form: we propose that the
most efficient way to represent them is through a semantic organization that
includes the features in a such a dynamic way that gets the best of an
ontology that lives in a graph.
•The Catalogue of Paintings of the Kingdoms:
• how to measure shared identities
• how to compare schools, authors, features
• how to track trajectories and flows

15. Semantic Maps vsGenres:
Clustering & Visualizations
• Using main descriptors (more
frequent and/or by types):
Religious, Civil, Portrait, Saint,
Virgin & Christ
• Project similarity classes in a
2D space using an MDS-like
algorithm
• For every descriptor, create a
potential surface using the
elements of the above-
mentioned distribution as focal
points
• Establish a threshold to bound
the surface for each descriptor

16. Cultural Areas
• A cultural areais a virtual or concrete space organized
through the same information technology and a flow
of common culture shared in different degrees by a
population.

17. Cultural Areas and Similarities:
1550-1650 1650-1750 1750-1850

18. Cultural Areas as “Territorial
Insertions”
“territorial insertions […] do not necessarily entail subsumption under
exclusive state authority because they are predicated on specific
denationalization in laws and policy in the service of a global regime”
(Sassen, 2006, 418)
“[these processes of globalization] are multisided, transboundary networks and
formations which can include normative orders; they connect subnational or
„national‟ processes, institutions and actors, but not necessarily through the formal
interstate system” (Sassen, 2006, 3)
• Mexico, Peru and Spain, as countries
• Different Territories
• New Spain and Peru as Viceroyalties

19. Cultural Areas and Territories: Mexico 1750-1775

20. Cultural Areas and Territories: Oaxaca 1750-1775

21. Cultural Areas and Viceroyalties: New Spain and Peru 1550-1650
NewSpainandPeru Peru (withoutAnonymous, specialattentiontoBitti)

22. Diversity
• Bar-Yam: local variety and the appropriate scale to
study a problem
• Diversity and complexity (Scott Page)
• Contexts of Art History: creation, change and
diffusion

23. Diversity: Cultural Areas and Creators
1550-1650

24. Diversity: Cultural Areas and Creators
1650-1750

25. Diversity: Cultural Areas and Creators
1750-1850

26. Diversity and Search
Quispe Tito, 1625-1650 (10.3%)

27. Diversity and Search
Quispe Tito, 1625-1650 (10.3%); withlabels

28. Flows
• From Braudel to David Christian
• Origin and Present Locations of Hispanic Baroque Painting
• The Sack of Latin America (Báez)?, New Colonialism? or Where Does
Art Belong?
• Museums of the 20th Century
• A new History of Art
• The Locality of Art and Postmodern Geographies

29. Flows and Transmission
• “The Baroque means many different things even across the visual cultures of western Europe,
depending on the date and the character of the work of art under consideration. There is no
convincing Baroque Zeitgeist, in the fullest sense, argued by the great cultural historian Jakob
Burckhardt, nor does Wölfflin‟s model of the Baroque —as a reaction against Renaissance—
always apply. We present the Baroque as a complex stage in the development of the post-
Renaissance classical language of design and we explore it through themes such as assemblage
and synthesis, the visual exploration of the physical space, the illusion of movement and
naturalistic ornament. Common to nearly all the works of art discussed is that they result
from the transmission of people, ideas, motifs or materials” (emphasis ours).
Nigel Llewellyn in Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn, eds. Baroque 1620-1800. Style in the Age of Magnificence. London V & A
Publishing, 2009 (20).

30. Flows and Cultural Transfers:
Brown‟s Triptych of Spanish Baroque Painting
• The Spanish Monarchy as a Cultural Area:
• Low Countries & Italy / Spain / Mexico (New Spain) / Peru
1650-1750 1750-1850
1550-1650

31. Flows and Cultural Transfers:
Brown‟s Triptych of Spanish Baroque Painting

32. Flows: Long-Durée and Big History

33. Conclusions

34. Conclusions and Further Work
Enrich the descriptors annotation to address more specific
questions on subsets of artworks (add iconography)
Improve the Similarity Measures
Extend Semantic Maps to Evolutionary Semantic Maps
Use Formal Concept Analysis for semantic classification

35. Thank you!
Questions?
Juan Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho, Javier de la Rosa
jsuarez@uwo.ca , fsancho@us.es, jdelaros@uwo.ca
CulturePlex Lab: http://www.cultureplex.ca