Koenraad Brosens

NAHR: a visual representation of social networks as support for art history research.

In the field of art history, the analysis of community dynamics can give researchers precious insight on the subjects of their studies. Data on genealogy and community bonds can provide a rich understanding of the functioning of a community. Traditional family trees are not designed to support extra-familial links and often lack the time-bound aspect of these relationships, and timeline-style tools miss the mark on representing the network dimension of such structures. We introduce NAHR (Networks in Art History Research), a tool that visualizes small networks of families connected through marriage, god-parenthood and professional relationships, and that provides insight in the change of these dynamics over time.

Claiming Commerce, Quality and Credit: Raisons d’être of the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

Literature on the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden tends to give a one-dimensional account of the institutions as very similar commercial enterprises that were embraced wholeheartedly by everyone involved in the Antwerp and Brussels tapestry worlds since they all shared the same concerns and a single goal — namely, to develop and secure a central meeting point and marketplace. This essay, however, adopts a different vantage point. It discusses the tapissierspanden from the viewpoint of the conflicting business conduct and strategies developed by Antwerp city council and tapestry entrepreneurs on the one hand, and Brussels tapestry entrepreneurs on the other. This essay argues that those who founded the institutions in Antwerp and Brussels established and used them to further completely different objectives — and that their strategies, which both manifested themselves and crystallised in the panden, present tapestry scholarship with a fundamental methodological problem, the magnitude of which has yet to be appreciated.

Visualizing and Analyzing Complex and Dynamic Networks of Flemish Tapestry Entrepreneurs (1640–1720)

This paper discusses the possibilities of visualizing and analyzing complex and dynamic social networks to understand the interplay between ever-changing social structure and artistic developments within the Antwerp and Brussels tapestry industry (1640–1720).