Digital Humanities 2023 Enriching Exhibition Scholarship Llewellyn, Clare clare.llewellyn@ed.ac.uk University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Sanderson, Robert robert.sanderson@yale.edu Yale University, USA Page, Kevin kevin.page@oerc.ox.ac.uk University of Oxford, United Kingdom Bhaugeerutty, Aruna aruna.bhaugeerutty@ashmus.ox.ac.uk The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Shapland, Andrew andrew.shapland@ashmus.ox.ac.uk The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Shipp, Kayla kayla.shipp@yale.edu Yale University, USA David, Kelly kelly.davis@yale.edu Yale University, USA Delmas-Glass, Emmanuelle emmanuelle.delmas-glass@yale.edu The Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, USA Bonnet, Tyler t.a.bonnet8@gmail.com University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom The co-exhibition of artworks has been part of cultural context for more than 250 years. Exhibitions, physical and digital, make art relevant and accessible to artists, scholars and the general pu- blic in a managed and directed environment. This engagement in- fluences emerging trends in style and the art market, but informa- tion on objects that were exhibited together, nor their reception from the audience, have been made available for art historical or digital humanities research. The Linked Art collaboration (Page et al. 2020) has developed a modern Linked Open Usable Data (Sanderson 2019) set of speci- fications to describe and publish art-related knowledge, including which objects were shown during which exhibitions. For this data to be truly connected, enabling scholars to seamlessly traverse in- stitutional silos, descriptions of exhibition events and art objects must be "reconciled": the descriptions of the same object should be connected together by matching identifiers in different systems at different institutions. The Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project is developing me- thodology to align socially-based textual and structured data, such as exhibition catalogues, newspapers and social media, making reconciliation easier and more effective. Aligning and enhancing records requires art history domain expertise, specific cultural he- ritage metadata knowledge, and advanced computational research in text analytics, machine learning, and information retrieval. This methodology includes a pipeline consisting of pre-processing, na- med entity recognition, and retrieval. Queries, generated by isola- ting and combining data are used to search extracted texts. Fuzzy matching scores for pairs of queries and texts are computed, those that meet retrieval and fuzzy matching score thresholds are con- sidered matches. Such techniques help the pipeline address retrie- val problems caused by variations in object and artist names. Figure 1. The production, acquisition and exhibitions of British Gentlemen in Rome, by K. Read As an illustrative example, the Yale Center for British Art lent the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford 19 artworks for the exhibition The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland in 2012, in- cluding the painting British Gentlemen in Rome, by Katharine Read from circa 1750. That object was also lent to the Yale Uni- versity Art Gallery for an exhibition in 1965 and most recently to the University of Arizona Museum of Art for their 2015 exhibition Rome: The Legacy of an Eternal City. Newspaper articles, such as in The Evening Standard and The Oxford Mail describe the exhi- bition and reference other works that were present, including Ba- toni Pompeo’s painting of Francis Basset, in the Museo del Prado. The exhibition catalogue is available from Yale University Press (ISBN 9780300176056), containing content and references. By mining social texts (in yellow, figure 1), and connecting with the Linked Art structured data from across institutions, we bring together both quantitative and qualitative information about ob- jects presented and responses to them. This assists with proven- ance research, style transmission, patterns of lending, interactions between museums via network analysis, and trends in exhibition themes over time and venue. Exhibitions discussed in contemporary social texts provide the context of these exhibitions and their works as described at the time they were held, which is not otherwise easily available to re- searchers. Continuing the example, the Oxford Mail described the Grand Tour Exhibition held at the Ashmolean as a “a multi-laye- red show” and “a unique snapshot of the Grand Tour: what these British tourists aspired to, shopped for, in order to show off their good taste and erudition once home; what sights affected them”. 1