€1.1 Million of New Funding Strengthens Digital Provenance Research at Leuphana
2024-11-25 Lüneburg/Hanover. Art historian Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother from Leuphana University Lüneburg is expanding her work to advance the digital documentation and accessibility of provenance research. She was awarded €1.1 million (approximately $1.2 million) in new funding from the State of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation for two of her projects. The first, “Modern Migrants,” focuses on the transformation of thousands of provenance records for paintings in US museums into actionable data, while the second, the “PAESE 3.0” project, will structure and enrich the data of museum collections from colonial contexts in Lower Saxony.
Museums, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions are increasingly researching the origins of their collections. However, the findings are often not recorded in a way that supports modern computational analysis—making it hard to search, link, analyze, or visualize the data. Prof. Rother’s work aims to bridge this gap, helping claimants, communities of origin and heirs identify looted objects in museum collections.
About the “Modern Migrants” Project
The “Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museums” project, launched in 2019, explores how to transform thousands of provenance texts into Linked Open Data (LOD). A major challenge lies in digitizing historical provenance details—many of which contain gaps, inaccuracies, or inconsistencies—into machine-readable formats. The project uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to automate information extraction and data structuring. With this latest round of funding, the research will continue through 2027.
About the “PAESE 3.0” Project
This four-year project will expand on a previous initiative of postcolonial provenance research in Lower Saxony, Germany. The earlier cross-institutional project, completed in 2022, was the first of its kind to focus on collections from colonial contexts in Germany and involved several regional museums and universities. Prof. Rother will now collaborate with Dr. Claudia Andratschke from the State Museum Hanover and the Network for Provenance Research in Lower Saxony to make the collected data accessible and interpretable for computational analysis. A particular focus will be placed on geographical information, as its digital representation is particularly complex due to colonial territorial divisions and shifting national borders.
The project is part of a broader initiative, “Digital Provenance and Collection Research,” led by Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, with research conducted at multiple sites in Bremerhaven, Göttingen, Hanover, Lüneburg, and Oldenburg.
Background
The Volkswagen Foundation supported Lynn Rother's professorship through its Lichtenberg Program, making it the first at a German university to focus solely on provenance research methods. Named after physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the program aims to attract top researchers and promote innovative teaching and research at German universities. After a successful review by an international panel in July 2024, Leuphana University made the professorship and two related research positions permanent.