SMTP: Stedelijk Museum Text Mining Project

This paper addresses how text-mining, machine-learning and information retrieval algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence can be used to analyze Art-Research archives and conduct (art-) historical research. To gain quick insight into the archive, two aspects are focused on: relations between groups of people using community detection, and global content changes over time using topic modeling. For such archives pre-tagged ground-truth collections are generally not available, and the archives are often too large, geographically distributed, and not always available in digital formats to build such a ground-truth at reasonable costs. To develop and test the validity and relevance of existing tools, close collaboration was established between the AI researchers, museum staff, and researchers in CREATE, a digital humanities project that investigates the development of cultural industries in Amsterdam over the course of the last five centuries.