The Vasari Project aims to explore those vast thematic spheres and organize them in accessible didactic graphs. The progressive circles contain several categories of relations such as male and female personalities, (painters and non-painters), as well as lists of art museums, artistic themes, technics and others. A simple glance is enough to discover, for instance, all the museum collections, containing the art works of a particular painter, different Wikimedia lists in which his or her name are involved, or some unexpected cross-historical social links.
The Vasari graphs try to reveal the underlying network of multiple cultural references and interdependences, proliferating around old masters in Wikipedia, but difficult to see directly. The simple visual organization of voluminous quantitative information is a short path to new sights in the field. Inspired among others by the theories of Edward Tufte, this project invites to explore the Wikipedia dimension of Art history and its benefits to didactics and research.
Temenuzhka Dimova
