Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

NEWSLETTER REPORT: “A New Approach to Provenance: The ‘Provenance Studies’ Program at Leuphana University Lüneburg”, 05/31/2022.

For the May 2022 newsletter of the Network of European Restitution Committees on Nazi-Looted Art, the Provenance Lab published a report on the outlook and activities of the ‘Provenance Studies’ program at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

In the report, the Lab observes that they are the first university research program producing Provenance LOD. “Such a transformation”, the report continues, “requires a shift in perspective: from provenance as a sequence of ownership periods to provenance as a sequence of events, which mark the beginning and end of consecutive ownership periods. That is, from an object-centered perspective to an event-centered approach.”

You can read the report in full here.

NEWS STORY: “It is Time for Catalogues Raisonnés to Join the Digital Age”, 12/01/2022.

On December 1st, 2020, ahead of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association’s (ICRA) conference, Lynn talked to The Art Newspaper‘s Georgina Adam about how, “until recently, valuable information harvested through time-consuming and resource-intensive provenance research was often recorded in forms that could be understood by human beings but not by computers”.

You can read the article here.

INTERVIEW: Lynn Rother interviewed on NDR’s radio podcast series ‘Das Gespräch’, 06/12/2020.

On June 12th, 2020, Lynn was interviewed by Claudia Christophersen for NDR‘s cultural podcast series ‘Das Gespräch‘, which invites prominent contemporaries from society to discuss art, culture and politics. Together with the “incomplete and questionable” nature of provenance, Lynn talked about her recent appointment to the first Lichtenberg-Professorship for Provenance Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

You can listen to their conversation here.

NEWS STORY: “Complete Clarification – Lynn Rother Teaches the New Subject of Provenance Studies in Lüneburg”, 03/01/2020.

Upon Lynn‘s appointment to the Lichtenberg-Professorship at Lüneburg, the German art magazine Art ran a two-page interview with her in their March issue of 2020. Under the title “Complete Clarification”, Lynn argued:

“In the last two decades in particular, an extraordinarily large amount of provenance data has been generated on individual objects, but it has not yet been analysed across museums and collections. When it comes to thousands of works with tens of thousands of changes in ownership, this may be an almost impossible task for a human being, but not for a computer. This is where methods from data science come in.”

INTERVIEW: “One Must Record the Inaccuracy”, 02/04/2020.

On February 24th, 2020, Lynn was interviewed by the national German weekly newspaper Die Zeit about how computer-based methods have thus far not been used for provenance research, but how her project at Leuphana University Lüneburg means to change. Amongst human biases, recording inaccuracies and the meaning of “messy or fuzzy data”, they talked about the “groundbreaking as well as promising” nature of Lynn’s project, which hopes to gain new insights into the distribution of artworks and thus make provenance research much more efficient.

You can read the article here.

NEWS STORY: “Lynn Rother Brings Art Research Forward”, 01/08/2020.

On January 8th, 2020, the German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung ran an article on Lynn‘s appointment to the prestigious Licthenberg-Professorship, which is described as “the first chair on provenance research methods that exists in Germany”. In her position, the TAZ reports, Lynn hopes to “advance the humanities through computer-assisted methods”.

You can read the article here.