At the 2017 Digital Provenance Symposium, hosted by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Elizabeth Gorayeb and Caitlin Sweeney shared the WPI’s vision to build an integrated digital archival and cataloguing platform and to publish dynamic online catalogues raisonnés. The WPI tech platform is supported by HANA, the relational database management system developed by one of our founders, Hasso Plattner, and the German company SAP. This tool will enable us to store large amounts of data, access digitized material at high speed, and in turn, make meaningful connections between objects and the plethora of resources that inform their history and significance. In sum, our investment in innovative technology, and the technological support that makes up part of our endowment, puts the WPI in a unique position to support art historical scholarship, in particular object-based studies and provenance research.
We learned a tremendous amount at this conference from museum professionals who recognize the great potential in cultivating networks of online resources. Amidst a growing desire for increased transparency in the art world and a genuine thirst for shared knowledge and resources, the WPI is committed to participating in the very exciting and evolving field of the digital humanities.