Just launched: The web interface “Vasari Diagram” – an open access tool for data visualization, designed to make accessible and easy to study the networks and semantic connections of old masters in Wikipedia.
Painters are not only present in Wikipedia by their own pages but also by numerous other pages, referring to them. Who mentions the old masters? What are the reasons and in what context does it happen? The Vasari Diagram aims to answer these questions by visualizing, in a clear and user friendly manner, some of the most important connections of many painters to historical and contemporary personalities, museum collections, various Wikimedia lists, iconographic topics, stylistic movements and other semantic fields. This extensive set of information is organized in a readable fashion and can be intuitively and rapidly browsed. The networks of individual painters can be compared to each other, in order to evaluate the place hold by everyone in the Wikipedia sphere. More importantly, the graphs reveal the predominant semantic fields of every painter. With the Vasari Diagram it is possible to explore the constantly evolving Wikipedia dimension of Art history and inspire both new pedagogical and research methods in the field.