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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

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Register for a CSMC lecture

Thursday, 22 June 2023, 6:15 pm – 8:00 pm CEST

Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, Room 0001 (Pavilion), and online

Tracing the Unknown: Learning from Provenance Data

Professor Dr Lynn Rother (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)

Recent restitution and decolonization efforts have shown that provenance has emancipated itself from being a subordinate cataloging task in museums and the art market to a self-conscious scientific endeavor with ethical and legal implications. While the minutiae of ownership and socio-economic custody changes are increasingly recorded digitally, they have yet to be analyzed on a large scale as provenance continues to be recorded as unstructured data. Experimenting with AI in structuring museum datasets, the untapped potential of analyzing object histories on a large scale has come within reach. However, the transformation of analog information and its digital offspring into structured data is not without challenges. This lecture will present experimental approaches and findings on the knowns and unknowns in provenance data.