Initial report on digitally researching the network drawings of Mark Lombardi

Abstract

We do digital research on the artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) as an experiment in methods for digital art history. We manually generate GraphML representations of the networks depicted in his drawings and publish them at http://www.lombardinetworks.net. Services on the data are implemented like textual search on labels of nodes or an index on what persons or institutions appear in which works. We visualize the networks with nodes linked to Wikipedia information about the actors. With calculations on the networks we generate synthetic drawings from multiple original works that overlap in actors.