Coding Provenance Workshop: AI in Provenance Research
2026-02-18 Tracing the journeys of artworks from their creation to the present remains a pressing, but also a complex, issue. The activities of dealers, collectors, and institutions offer a window into the often-complicated past. But what happens when, instead of tracing one object, we are mapping thousands of them? That question sparked the first international workshop of museum and provenance professionals dedicated to exploring computational provenance, a collaboration between Leuphana University’s Provenance Lab and the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Provenance Index.
The Provenance Lab at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, led by art historian and provenance specialist Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother, brings together provenance research with computational methods. Prof. Rother and her team have identified a substantial need in the provenance community to learn and apply computational methodologies. As a result, the Provenance Lab collaborated with the Getty Provenance Index and its lead, Dr. Sandra van Ginhoven, to conduct the first international workshop on computational provenance.
The Coding Provenance Workshop, held in Lüneburg from December 18 to 21, 2025, was conducted by Dr. Bárbara Romero Ferrón (Leuphana) and Dr. Giulia Taurino (Getty Research Institute) and was designed specifically for the provenance community. The idiosyncrasies of provenance—its gaps, uncertainties, and messy real-world information—shape both the questions we ask of it and the techniques and methods used. Ultimately, the workshop brought together 20 provenance experts from 11 countries. Among the institutions represented were London’s British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The participants learned to use and develop digital ontologies, artificial intelligence applications, programming workflows, network analysis, and data visualizations to support provenance research at scale. For this purpose, participants were encouraged to work with their own data to have immediately relevant insights.
The workshop was not only hands-on. It also sparked critical discussions and a shared sense that an international working group is needed as a forum for provenance experts to exchange emerging challenges. Participants described an “amazing” group of colleagues, an “intense” workshop experience, and a unique opportunity to “learn a lot” in a short amount of time. The urgency of the Coding Provenance Workshop was confirmed by the response it received: nearly 200 applications arrived from 40 countries for just 20 places. That level of interest not only confirmed the mission and vision of the Provenance Lab but also highlights the demand for more official, interdisciplinary, international programs like this to be offered in academic and museum settings. Another edition of the workshop at the Getty in Los Angeles is planned for the end of 2026.