About Histolines

  Bridging Art History and Digital Humanities: 27,000+ Images from The Art Institute of Chicago Now on Histolines As historians and digital humanities scholars, we know that context transforms how we understand cultural artifacts. Today, I'm excited to share how Histolines is making that context more accessible through computational approaches to historical data. What We've Built Histolines has integrated over 27,000 artwork images from The Art Institute of Chicago 's Open Access collection into our interactive historical timeline platform. But this isn't simply a digital gallery—it's a chronological framework that places artistic production within the broader sweep of historical events. The Technical Approach Using natural language processing, we've developed crawlers that extract structured data from image descriptions—specifically historical names , locations, and temporal references. This automated metadata extraction allows us to position each artwork w...

  Histolines Mining Historical Photography Collections:  Integrating 20,000+ Images from NYPL Digital Archives One of the central challenges in digital humanities is transforming unstructured archival data into discoverable, contextual resources. Our work with the   New York Public Library’s digital collections   illustrates both the possibilities and practical constraints of this approach. The Dataset Challenge NYPL released approximately 180,000 photographs through their open-source initiative — a remarkable contribution to public scholarship. However, only a fraction contained the structured metadata necessary for automated integration: names, dates, and location data that our natural language processors could reliably extract. We successfully integrated over 20,000 photographs that met these criteria, effectively doubling our photographic collection at the time. The remainder presented a common archival reality: rich visual documentation with incomplete temporal ...