Before declaring her major at the end of her first year of undergrad at Queen’s University, Liran already knew that she wanted to pursue her degree in art history, and had known since she had to write her first slide test in grade nine art class. After specializing in Dutch art and the Italian Renaissance at Queen’s, she decided to concentrate her graduate research on art crime research and cultural heritage preservation.

A brief academic obsession with the history of playing cards and their non-game uses led Liran to create an original educational game about art looting during the Second World War, which specialized her focus further. The final missing piece in her Master’s study was a twenty-year-old article about an eccentric art thief whose stolen works had not yet been identified or repatriated. That was until Liran developed her skills in Provenance Research and created a unique database tracing the histories of those stolen paintings. As a Digital Humanities student, Liran found a niche angle in the field of Art Crime Research and published her master’s thesis on Computational Approaches to Art Provenance and used the eccentric art thief’s deception as a case study.

Using various network analyses with manually extracted historical data, Liran’s graduate work argued for non-traditional ways to visualize painting provenance by tracing locations and owners via a complex visual social web to contextualize the histories of the works. With this, Liran’s research continues to look at the provenance of these specific paintings and she is continuing to work on applying computational approaches to the study of Art Crime Research.