ABSTRACT
This chapter acknowledges that the tenacious refusal to embrace new–old digital art history is to a certain extent justifiable. A majority of digital platforms are goal-oriented algorithmic black boxes that cause a critical loss of “situation awareness,” meaning that art historians no longer have a proper understanding of the data and information highways and landscapes they are increasingly forced to navigate. Cornelia is a MySQL database that contains a wide array of archival data about the seventeenth-century “art worlds” in Antwerp and Brussels. The data is extracted from a myriad of archival sources, including parish records, notarial deeds which include a wide array of documents, such as declarations of debt, leases and registers of guilds and corporations.
