The AI Provenance Index is an interdisciplinary research initiative based at Northeastern University that develops new scholarly frameworks for documenting, citing, and interpreting the datasets that train artificial intelligence. Bringing together expertise in art history, museum studies, digital humanities, network science, and AI research, the project addresses one of the central challenges of contemporary AI: making training data visible, accountable, and historically legible.
While public discussions of AI often focus on algorithms and models, the AI Provenance Index shifts attention to the datasets that make those systems possible. Contemporary AI is trained on vast collections of images, texts, and other cultural materials, yet there are few standards for documenting where these datasets originate, how they are assembled, or how they evolve and circulate over time. As museums, archives, libraries, and digital collections increasingly become part of AI training pipelines, questions of provenance, attribution, and stewardship have become central to understanding AI’s cultural impact.
Developed through a collaboration between Northeastern’s Center for the Arts in the College of Arts, Media and Design and the BarabásiLab at the Network Science Institute, the AI Provenance Index approaches training datasets not simply as technical infrastructure but as cultural objects with histories of authorship, transformation, and institutional context. Drawing on methodologies from art history, archival studies, museum cataloguing, and digital humanities, the project develops new standards for documenting, citing, and interpreting AI training data as scholarly and cultural objects.
By establishing provenance as a scholarly requirement for AI training data, the AI Provenance Index lays the foundation for a humanities-led infrastructure of algorithmic stewardship, demonstrating how humanistic methods can shape the future development and governance of artificial intelligence.
The AI Provenance Index is supported by a Creative Catalyst Seed Grant from Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD).
Research Team
The project is led by a cross-disciplinary team from the College of Arts, Media and Design in collaboration with the Network Science Institute:
- Gloria Sutton (Principal Investigator), Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, Department of Art + Design, College of Arts, Media and Design
- Sylke René Meyer, Professor, Department of Theatre, College of Arts, Media and Design
- Juliana Rowen Barton, Director, Center for the Arts, College of Arts, Media and Design
- Jennifer Gradecki, Associate Professor, Department of Art + Design, College of Arts, Media and Design
- Derek Curry, Associate Professor, Department of Art + Design, College of Arts, Media and Design
- Julia Flanders, Professor of the Practice, Department of English and Director, Digital Scholarship Group
- Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor, Network Science Institute
- Jacopo Mattia Conti, Research Affiliate, BarabásiLab, Network Science Institute
