- Building on the extensive production of provenance data recently, this article explains how we can expand the purview of computational analysis in humanistic and social sciences by exploring how digital methods can be ap- plied to provenances. Provenances document chains of events of ownership and socio-economic custody changes of artworks. They promise statistical and com- parative insights into social and economic trends and networks. Such analyses, however, necessitate the transformation of provenances from their textual form into structured data. This article first explores some of the analytical avenues aggregate provenance data can offer for transdisciplinary historical research. It then explains in detail the use of deep learning to address natural language processing tasks for transforming provenance text into structured data, such as Sentence Boundary Detection and Span Categorization. To illustrate the poten- tial of this pioneering approach, this article ends with twoBuilding on the extensive production of provenance data recently, this article explains how we can expand the purview of computational analysis in humanistic and social sciences by exploring how digital methods can be ap- plied to provenances. Provenances document chains of events of ownership and socio-economic custody changes of artworks. They promise statistical and com- parative insights into social and economic trends and networks. Such analyses, however, necessitate the transformation of provenances from their textual form into structured data. This article first explores some of the analytical avenues aggregate provenance data can offer for transdisciplinary historical research. It then explains in detail the use of deep learning to address natural language processing tasks for transforming provenance text into structured data, such as Sentence Boundary Detection and Span Categorization. To illustrate the poten- tial of this pioneering approach, this article ends with two examples of prelimi- nary analysis of structured provenance data.…
