Constructing an Artworld Influencers Network by Mining Social Media

Implicit artistic influence, although visually plausible, is often undocumented and thus poses a historically constrained attribution problem: resemblance is necessary but not sufficient evidence. Most prior systems reduce influence discovery to embedding similarity or label-driven graph completion, while recent multimodal large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to temporal inconsistency and unverified attributions. This paper introduces M-ArtAgent, an evidence-based multimodal agent that reframes implicit influence discovery as probabilistic adjudication. It follows a four-phase protocol consisting of Investigation, Corroboration, Falsification, and Verdict governed by a Reasoning and Acting (ReAct)-style controller that assembles verifiable evidence chains from images and biographies, enforces art-historical axioms, and subjects each hypothesis to adversarial falsification via a prompt-isolated critic. Two theory-grounded operators, StyleComparator for Wolfflin formal analysis and ConceptRetriever for ICONCLASS-based iconographic grounding, ensure that intermediate claims are formally auditable. On the balanced WikiArt Influence Benchmark-100 (WIB-100) of 100 artists and 2,000 directed pairs, M-ArtAgent achieves 83.7% positive-class F1, 0.666 Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and 0.910 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), with leakage-control and robustness checks confirming that the gains persist when explicit influence phrases are masked. By coupling multimodal perception with domain-constrained falsification, M-ArtAgent demonstrates that implicit influence analysis benefits from historically grounded adjudication rather than pattern matching alone.

The global landscape of art-technology institutions, including festivals, biennials, research labs, conferences, and hybrid organizations, has grown increasingly diverse, yet systematic frameworks for analyzing their multidimensional characteristics remain scarce. This paper proposes ASTRA (Art-technology Institution Spatial Taxonomy and Relational Analysis), a computational methodology combining an eight-axis conceptual framework (Curatorial Philosophy, Territorial Relation, Knowledge Production Mode, Institutional Genealogy, Temporal Orientation, Ecosystem Function, Audience Relation, and Disciplinary Positioning) with a text-embedding and clustering pipeline to map 78 cultural-technology institutions into a unified analytical space. Each institution is characterized through qualitative descriptions along the eight axes, encoded via E5-large-v2 sentence embeddings and quantized through a word-level codebook into TF-IDF feature vectors. Dimensionality reduction using UMAP, followed by agglomerative clustering (Average linkage, k=10), yields a composite score of 0.825, a silhouette coefficient of 0.803, and a Calinski-Harabasz index of 11196. Non-negative matrix factorization extracts ten latent topics, and a neighbor-cluster entropy measure identifies boundary institutions bridging multiple thematic communities. An interactive React-based tool enables curators, researchers, and policymakers to explore institutional similarities and cross-disciplinary connections. Results reveal coherent groupings such as an art-science hub cluster anchored by ZKM and ArtScience Museum, an innovation and industry cluster including Ars Electronica, transmediale, and Sonar, an ACM academic cluster comprising TEI, DIS, and NIME, and an electronic music cluster including CTM Festival, MUTEK, and Sonic Acts. Code and data: https://github.com/joonhyungbae/astra

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Cultural NLP, with substantial efforts to create globally inclusive NLP systems. The rapid growth of literature in this field makes it difficult to track trends in methods and data resources. To address this, we analyze over 375 papers to answer three complementary questions: (1) What Cultural Capabilities (CCs) are being targeted in NLP systems? (2) How are cultural data resources being created? and (3) What methods are being used to improve the CCs of those systems? We discuss trends observed across the three questions, and identify relevant research gaps. To facilitate further research in this field, we release our full list of analyzed papers in the form of an interactive web interface, which includes a feature to allow researchers to add their work; we hope this facilitates future research and proves to be a valuable resource for the Cultural NLP community.