OK Computer

How Bárbara Romero Ferrón uses technology to study centuries-old art and defy human limitations

A person works with art catalogues and colorful graphs in an office space

By Anya Ventura

Apr 20, 2023

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Why would an art historian need to learn how to code?

For Bárbara Romero Ferrón, a Getty graduate intern, big data provides a new way of understanding 19th-century art history.

“Imagine you want to study the depiction of children in artworks. The human eye can study a number of things, but at some point, you cannot do all of them in the world—you cannot do more than hundreds or thousands of pictures because we are limited,” says Romero Ferrón, who began exploring digital art history during her last year of undergraduate studies in Málaga, Spain. Instead of analyzing images one by one, art historians can study and compare them in much vaster quantities with the help of computers. It is then the job of the scholar to organize and create meaning from this data.

Romero Ferrón put technology to work to study 19th-century exhibitions of Spanish art. She’s used the data from hundreds of catalogs to understand why certain artists have been canonized. While Spanish artists like Francisco Goya or Diego Velázquez are synonymous with Spanish art, these exhibitions often included as many as 500 different artists. Who were these other artists? Romero Ferrón asks. And how were they connected to one another?

With data culled from sources like Getty Vocabularies and archival catalogs, Romero Ferrón creates elaborate, colorful data visualizations showing the links between Spanish artists who exhibited work together, which appear as nodes in the network. To create these visualizations, she uses an open-source software called Gephi and processes the information with the programming language Python.

A person works with art catalogues and colorful graphs in an office space

While many art historians understand Spanish art through the books published at the time, analyzing the data from exhibitions uncovers the little-known stories of other important creators of the day, says Romero Ferrón. Using data from auctions and sale records, she can then determine how these artists measured up to better known personalities. With this information, she is then able to tell new narratives about art. “It’s a different way of understanding our history,” she says.

Romero Ferrón digitizes information she finds in the archives because she believes it should be available to everyone. And although she studies the 19th century because she enjoys archival research, she says this kind of data visualization and analysis can also be applied to contemporary art. One recent study, she says, determined where contemporary artists had to exhibit, and with whom, to be successful in today’s art market.

For Romero Ferrón, it was exciting to come to the Getty Research Institute, which is known for its work in the digital humanities with projects like the Getty Vocabularies and the Getty Provenance Index, a vast database of archival sales catalogues, inventories, and stock books from the 16th century on.

A person works with art catalogues and colorful graphs in an office space

“I was already very connected to that. I thought it was interesting to see what I can do here and how I can grow,” says Romero Ferrón, who was first introduced to the digital humanities by her professor in Spain, another former Getty graduate intern. While digital art history is still a small subset of art history, learning computational tools is becoming more important as data plays a larger role in our lives. In a world run by data—an increasingly hot commodity—gaining this kind of literacy is crucial for scholars in the humanities.

“It’s a different way of understanding things,” says Romero Ferrón, “to see everything in the big picture.”

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