- Home
- AboutWhy ‘count’ art? Because all cultures, from the most ancient all the way to your own community, utilize symbols and repetitive elements in art. By tracking the use and context of these symbols and elements, we gain insight into the meanings behind them. This is particularly important when we study ancient cultures or those that are considered ‘lost’, but even well known artists often had their own hidden agendas. Michelangelo, for instance, hid precise anatomical drawings in his Sistine Chapel, but these were only recently recognized. How much more is hidden in plain sight? Any image of any kind in any media from any period can be counted. This is true whether it is a relief image on an ancient Egyptian temple wall, a Rembrandt painting, an Etruscan sculpture, or a modern mixed media work. Below is a concise introduction to the Art of Counting, followed by a complete transcript. Transcript: Why ‘count’ art? Because all cultures, from the most ancient all the way to your own community, utilize symbols and repetitive elements in art. By tracking the use and context of these symbols and elements, we gain insight into the meanings behind them. This is particularly important when we…
- Blog
- Variable of the Day
- Gallery
- Tacky TouristsThis is the gallery for our ongoing series of tourists wearing or doing, shall we say…interesting things. Tourists seem to have an amazingly oblivious quality about them, regardless of the attraction they are visiting. In my early 20′s, I worked at Walt Disney World in Orlando for several years and saw some intensely bizarre behavior from our guests. These people were from all countries and walks of life; it didn’t really seem to matter–tackiness comes in many, many flavors. We’d joke that there was a cast member (aka employee) and storage unit at every entrance to the property, greeting each guest with a chipper “Welcome to Walt Disney World! Please leave your brain in the locker and gather it upon exit–you won’t need it here!” Getting punched in the face by a 65 year-old woman, angry that her wailing granddaughter had been unable to gather signatures from all four of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles due to the crowd at their popular ‘Meet and Greet’ appearance, was one of my more surreal experiences to date. In traveling to historic landmarks in Europe, I was often disturbed by the utter lack of knowledge of some visitors. One woman I encountered in…
- SupportCollaborate with the Art of Counting Team: If you are a subject matter expert in any area of art history (a graduate degree or higher is preferred, but not always a requirement), you can help Art of Counting by adding the images from your area of expertise into the database. This includes the creation of variable lists and data entry. I am currently working on a few non-Egyptian variable lists, including a list designed to record information about Etruscan art, one for Ancient Near Eastern material, a list for Rembrandt portraiture, and another to record Salvador Dali’s paintings. Leave a comment below if you are interested in collaboration. Help Fund the Art of Counting: Let’s face it, there are costs to this kind of endeavor. Just maintaining the website costs $15 per month, we need to purchase new software to build the next iteration of the database, and all of it requires a lot of time. Any support you feel like giving would be sincerely appreciated and put to extremely good use in this pursuit! Thank you for your interest in this project.
- ProductsCan’t get enough of ancient Egypt? Need some unique gifts? Want to support ground-breaking research? Get it all by visiting the new Art of Counting store! A wide selection of calenders, note cards, coffee mugs, water bottles, and more, all embellished with unique images recorded during my research seasons in Egypt. Something in this growing collection of products is sure to please even the most discerning Egyptophiles! Professional Egyptologists, infamous for filling their offices with Egyptian imagery, will delight in the Seth mouse pad, feluca clock, and excellent views from the Qurn in our ‘Hiking the Theban Hills’ calender. And you will love knowing that a portion of the proceeds go directly to funding the Art of Counting project, a collaborative effort dedicated to bringing quantifiable statistical analyses to the investigation of our visual record. Happy shopping!
Art of Counting founder Dr. Amy Calvert now contributing to Smarthistory project, presented by Khan Academy
1A few weeks ago, I became aware of a marvelous art history project known as Smarthistory. Founded by two New York art historians, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory grew from their pursuit of creating an accessible way to introduce art history to …
Read More
-
A succinct introduction to the wonders of data mining!
An article on data mining appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. This brief piece explains a number of the complex methods of data mining in wonderfully simple terms. Discovering information from data takes two major forms: description and prediction. At the scale we are talking about, …
Read More -
The Art of Counting’s premier statistical guru weighs in on Factor Analysis
Our amazing statistical partner, Lili Garrard, is a Senior Analyst at the University of Kansas School of Nursing. She has been involved with the Art of Counting project for more than four years now and has performed a wide array of analyses on the data …
Read More -
Unlootable Egypt: Making the Ancient Immortal and Accessible
Delighted by more and more confirmed news emerging of undamaged sites (for regular news updates from multiple sources, see the excellent Egyptology News, Egyptological Looting Database, and Talking Pyramids websites), many of which were guarded by heroic ordinary Egyptians and SCA officials. Anyone who has …
Read More 
The Egyptian protests, the future of Egyptology, and a call to action
The current protests in Egypt show us exactly how fragile the illusion of stability can be in the face of reality. It truly is astonishing that these ancient objects and sites have survived at all, across these thousands of years. It is breathtaking and utterly …
Read More
Art of Counting founder Amy Calvert to receive PhD in Egyptology
It is my great pleasure to announce the successful defense of my Ph.D. dissertation, on which the Art of Counting project is based. On Friday, January 21, I met my advisor, David O’Connor, my readers, Ogden Goelet and Diana Craig Patch (Associate Curator, Department of …
Read More-
The importance of data hygiene
New analysis of the ‘mystery’ equis found in 2004 at Pompeii reveals that the initial data was corrupted. The find and the subsequent DNA analysis generated much excitement about a previously unknown extinct breed of horse, but upon reexamination it was discovered that there had …
Read More 
How to choose a research topic? Just follow the data!
A number of people have responded to the red looped sash discussion with a very important question: how, and why, did I choose the looped sash to investigate? The answer is quite simple: the data led me there. This is the fundamental principle of the …
Read More-
Directed searching vs. Data-driven research
The Art of Counting project is based on the combination of a custom-built relational database and advanced statistical methods. The database revolves around a core of variables that are recorded in a binary (yes or no) manner. In the case of my dissertation project, which …
Read More 
Cluster analysis is NOT scary, I promise
Cluster analysis as defined by a statistician: A procedure by which subjects, cases, or variables are clustered into groups based on similar characteristics of each. Hierarchical cluster analysis attempts to identify relatively homogenous groups of variables (or cases) based on selected characteristics. An algorithm is …
Read More
