One Art Lover’s Crusade To Catalog The World | FiveThirtyEight

"For the past three years, Jason Bailey has been hunting these catalogs down. He’s baffled librarians with his voluminous requests. He’s searched for libraries with liberal lending policies, so he can spend time with these pricey rare books. He’s scoured eBay and Amazon. He’s sought out a friend with a Ph.D. in Italian to decipher one rare catalog.

His mission: to turn them all into a proper digital database.

A catalogue raisonné typically lists each piece’s title, dimensions, date, medium, location, provenance, exhibition history, condition and occasionally even more. Together, these represent a comprehensively large and remarkably rich set of data on the most beautiful, seminal and expensive works of modern art. But this data is scattered, unsearchable and unanalyzable, locked away in countless books high on dusty library shelves, or shrink-wrapped and bearing stupefying price tags at boutique bookshops. “It’s locked up in these old books — hard to find, out of print, not very dynamic,” Bailey said. 'For all this talk about ‘big data,’ I’ve seen over and over again — you need the data.'"