Coding Our Collection: The National Gallery of Art Datathon

The National Gallery of Art will be the first American art museum to invite teams of data scientists and art historians to analyze, contextualize, and visualize its permanent collection data. The Gallery’s full permanent collection data has been released to six teams of researchers from institutions including Bennington College, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, George Mason University, Macalester College, New College of Florida, University of California, Los Angeles, and Williams College. Questions from curators, conservators, and researchers will help guide this analysis, and teams are encouraged to pursue whichever avenues of inquiry they find most compelling. The study will culminate in a two-day Datathon during which the teams will finalize their visualizations and present their findings at a public livestreamed event on Friday, October 25, 2019, at 3:30 p.m. The project is led by Diana Greenwald, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art.