Project ‘Art DATIS’ receives NWO Creative Industries funding

The Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) has granted Smart Culture – Big Data / Digital Humanities funding of ca. € 500.000 for the project Digital Art Technical sources for the Netherlands: Integration and improvement of sources on glass for a Sustainable future (Art DATIS), by prof. dr. Sven Dupré (Principal Investigator; UU/UvA), dr. Marieke Hendriksen (UU), dr. Evangelos Kanoulas (UvA) and their private partners RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History (Anita Hopmans and Reinier van ‘t Zelfde), Stichting Vrij Glas (Durk Valkema) and Picturae (Mark Lindeman).

The project, which will start in 2018, will focus on the questions of how historical sources were used to innovate glass production and education in the twentieth century, and how we can efficiently link the enormous amount of newly digitized art technical sources on artistic glass production, such as object documentation, technical texts, images, and research data. The project will digitize unique materials from the archives of glass artist Sybren Valkema (1916-1996), managed by Stichting Vrij Glas, and integrate and enrich them with existing databases containing different kinds of data on the history of artistic glass production. The project is designed to link with the RKD Explore and ARTECHNE databases. The latter, directed by Marieke Hendriksen, is part of the ERC Artechne Project led by Sven Dupré. The Art DATIS researchers will collaborate with internationally renowned data and collections specialists from the Corning Museum of Glass and Glasmuseum Hentrich/Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf to ensure integration with museum databases worldwide.

The project will recruit two PhD students – a glass historian and a data scientist. Both will be embedded at the RKD and Stichting Vrij Glas and will start their work in 2018.