Mining the Cloud of Witness: Inferring the Prestige of Saints from Medieval Paintings
This paper explores the possibility of applying the concept of distant reading to visual culture. Using a corpus of medieval images of St. Francis, the study incorporates data mining and network analysis to infer the prestige of saints. In turn, these measurements provide the basis for testing and exploring themes related to the artwork. Despite some methodological issues, the approach produces results consistent with our historical understanding of this artwork and its context.
