Travel Tales: Visualizing Provenance as Data

Elizabeth Honig; Deb Niemeier; Christine Quach; Haojian Cheng

doi:10.11588/dahj.2025.10.100894

Travel Tales

Visualizing Provenance as Data

Elizabeth Honig (Author)
Deb Niemeier (Author)

University of Maryland, College Park

Deb Niemeier is the Clark Distinguished Chair, a Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research includes cross-disciplinary STEM visualizations.

She has published more than 250 peer-reviews papers with a focus on the identification of vulnerable populations and environmental health disparities in the built environment. She studies risks associated with outcomes in the intersection of sociol and demographics factors, housing and infrastructure with environmental hazards such as air quality, climate change and disasters. Her international development work is aimed at agricultural sustainability.
Christine Quach (Author)

University of Maryland, College Park
Haojian Cheng (Author)

University of Maryland, College Park

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/dahj.2025.10.100894

Abstract

Provenance—the history of an artwork’s locations and ownership over time—has been particularly resistant to analysis in the form of data. Especially large amounts of provenance material is difficult to regularize since provenance is often rather fragmentary and has been recorded in semi-narrative form. Our project has regularized the provenance data for 765 paintings by Baroque artist Jan Brueghel and then visualized it. This article discusses what those data can tell us about the artist’s patrons in his home city of Antwerp and elsewhere in Europe, and then about the travels of his works and how their movement registers shifts in taste.

Travel Tales

Visualizing Provenance as Data

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