ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates art historians focusing on several different periods and cultures have already deployed computational network analysis to explore, analyze, and understand complex patterns in accumulated troves of primary and secondary art-historical sources. The rhetoric of networks holds a particular attraction for art historians. Implicit discussions of networks span a wide spectrum of specialties and methodologies within the discipline, and it is quite possible to write productively about art-historical networks without even touching on data, computing, or mathematics. Network analysis methods are most impactful, however, for their ability not only to characterize individual positions with networks, but also to describe entire topologies and to show how they can change over time. The contingency of image and physical object in art-historical interpretation further complicates efforts to integrate analogous methods into our discipline.
