Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives. Semantic Web Applications for Connoisseurship

The purpose of this work is threefold: (i) to facilitate knowledge discovery in art historical photo archives, (ii) to support users' decision-making process when evaluating contradictory artwork attributions, and (iii) to provide policies for information quality improvement in art historical photo archives. The approach is to leverage Semantic Web technologies in order to aggregate, assess, and recommend the most documented authorship attributions. In particular, findings of this work offer art historians an aid for retrieving relevant sources, assessing textual authoritativeness (i.e. internal grounds) of sources of attribution, and evaluating cognitive authoritativeness of cited scholars. At the same time, the retrieval process allows art historical data providers to define a low-cost data integration process to update and enrich their collection data. The contributions of this thesis are the following: (1) a methodology for representing questionable information by means of ontologies; (2) a conceptual framework of Information Quality measures addressing dimensions of textual and cognitive authoritativeness characterising art historical data, (3) a number of policies for metadata quality improvement in art historical photo archives as derived from the application of the framework, (4) a ranking model leveraging the conceptual framework, (5) a semantic crawler, called mAuth, that harvests authorship attributions in the Web of Data, and (6) an API and a Web Application to serve information to applications and final users for consuming data. Despite findings are limited to a restricted number of photo archives and datasets, the research impacts on a broader number of stakeholders, such as archives, museums, and libraries, which can reuse the conceptual framework for assessing questionable information, mutatis mutandi, to other near fields in the Humanities

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin