Figure 1
Sources of structural data complexity in exhibition catalogues.
Figure 2
Annotated catalogue pages illustrating data complexity in exhibition catalogues: (a) legibility issues such as faint print or overwritten text, (b) implicit reference to the artist in the previous line (‘dezelfde’), (c) ambiguous metadata formatting and structure, (d) extensive annotations including additional metadata such as lender and material information, (e) multilingual text, and (f) layout inconsistencies across catalogues. Photo RKD — Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis.
Table 1
Data dictionary synthesizing the category titles, their meanings, and the reasoning behind their creation.
| CATEGORY | MEANING AND REASON | EXAMPLE |
|---|---|---|
| Catalogue ID ≡ | Document title. Catalogue ID and database linker. | 201503502 |
| Keyword Person ≡ | Full name of the artist. Matches category title of existing database. | A. H. BAKHUIJZEN, Jr. |
| Artist City ≡ | City of artist. Location marker. | te ’s Hage |
| Artist Address △ | Extended address line if applicable. Additional location marker, less often specified in catalogue. Valuable for insight on artist mobility, especially for international artists who were more likely to provide full addresses. | — |
| Artist Abbreviation ∪ | Catch-all category for exhibition-relevant information, such as membership and competition status. Not all exhibitions used the same abbreviations, and artists sometimes had multiple in the same entry. Created as a catch-all due to non-standardized abbreviations across exhibitions. | BL |
| Entry Number ≡ | Entry ID. Listing number of the artwork in the catalogue. | 1 |
| Free Title ≡ | Title of the artwork. Artwork distinction and matches existing database category. | Een Panorama in de omstreken van ’s Gravenhage |
| Additional artwork info ∪ | Anything listed about the artwork that is not part of the title, such as material, quote, ownership, or location. Created as a catch-all due to the variety of entries and inconsistencies across catalogues. | unknown |
| Asterisk △ | True/False depending on the presence of the * symbol. This symbol usually indicates whether an artwork is for sale, but can have other meanings throughout the catalogues. The meaning is only found on introductory pages. | False |
| Amount Type ≡ | Asking price. Matches the existing database. | — |
| Currency △ | Currency in alphabetical abbreviated label, for example HFL. This format matches the existing database instead of a currency symbol or other abbreviations. | — |
| Price ≡ | Price of the artwork. Matches existing database and adds price data to artworks. | — |
| Full Entry Quote ∪ | Complete quote of the entry as formatted in the catalogue. Matches existing database and stores data without adjustments. | A. H. BAKHUIJZEN, Jr., te ’s Hage. B.L. 1 Een Panorama in de omstreken van ’s Gravenhage. |
Figure 3
Entry from the Tentoonstelling van schilder- en andere kunstwerken van levende meesters, held in Amsterdam by the Maatschappij Arti et Amicitiae, 1857. Photo RKD — Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis.
Figure 4
Representative prompt used in the VLM workflow to extract and structure catalogue entries into predefined fields. As the model’s behavior evolved over time, the prompt required periodic refinement during the exploratory phase.
Table 2
Comparative performance of OCR+LLM and VLM pipelines across structural data challenges.
| LEVEL | DATA CHALLENGE | DEGREE OF RESOLUTION | FAILURE MODE | INTERVENTION NEEDED | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OCR+LLM | VLM | ||||
| Document | Text legibility | Partial | Consistent | Character-level noise propagates into fields | Spot-check output and correct errors |
| Document | Implicit content (e.g. “idem”, “dezelfde”) | Minimal | Consistent | Field left blank or misassigned | Adjust prompts or manually propagate values |
| Document | Semantic ambiguity and interpretation gaps | Partial | Partial | Classification of values in incorrect fields | Review and correct field assignments |
| Document | Post-production annotations and marginalia | Minimal | Consistent | Incorrect extraction or annotation merged with entry text | Filter out or verify non-original content |
| Document | Multilinguality | Partial | Consistent | Language switching confuses field assignment | Standardize or translate extracted values |
| Cross-cat. | Font variation | Partial | Consistent | Character forms or typographic emphasis are misread or inconsistently interpreted | Correct misread values and normalize formatting cues |
| Cross-cat. | Layout variation | Partial | Consistent | Entry splitting or merging | Correct segmentation or merge entries |
| Cross-cat. | Metadata variability | Minimal | Partial | Fields missing or inconsistently populated | Manually align outputs to schema |
| Cross-cat. | Language drift | Minimal | Partial | Inconsistent field assignment and lack of normalization | Standardize terms across corpus and reconcile variants |
| Contextual | Historical shifts | Minimal | Minimal | Entity variation across time prevents matching | Disambiguate entities using external sources |
| Contextual | Legacy structuring bias | Minimal | Minimal | Conflicting field definitions and granularity | Reconcile fields with existing database conventions |