Art History and the Digital Humanities: Invited response to Hubertus Kohle, "Kunstgeschichte und Digital Humanities. Einladung zu einer Debatte = Art History and the Digital Humanities. Invitation to a Debate" (original) (raw)

Digital Art History at the Crossroads

kunsttexte.de, 2017

Information and Communications Technologies, and more specifically online digital media, are revolutionizing the ways to produce and disseminate scientific knowledge. Humanities and social sciences -art history among them- are not alien to this process. The new challenges and opportunities have already generated a body of thinking and abundant case studies. Many of these applications have been exploratory, disconnected, and short-lived, but nonetheless very stimulating. This essay offers a report on the state of the conversation: a meeting at the crossroads, briefly outlining debates, agreements and disagreements, (dis)continuities with the broader framework of the discipline, and future perspectives.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND ART HISTORY

Chapter title: Approaching Aby Warburg and Digital Art History Thinking Through Images, 2020

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on transdisciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education. Kathryn Brown is a lecturer in art history and visual culture at Loughborough University, UK.

Digital art history: a subject in transition

2005

First Published in the UK in 2005 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First Published in the USA in 2005 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA Copyright© 2005 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No ...

Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

The Art Bulletin, 1997

When I start a new class in art history and multimedia, I warn my students that they are signing on to the crew of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, and we are setting off on a organizing and cataloguing them so that we can locate those we need. Pedagogy, however, sometimes lagged behind. I still remember with great angst one of the questions on my doctoral examinations: "List all the bibliographic entries for Michelangelo since World War II with place and date of publication." (And this was not an open-book examination!) Needless to say, I failed that part of the exam, but the academic gods must have wanted me to receive my Ph.D., because the next time around the professor asked for the entire bibliography on Jan van Eyck, which I had memorized. Old habits die hard, and old teaching habits die even harder. Changes in the use of visual resources available to us have sometimes been met with the same conservatism that is found in the unwillingness to embrace the retrieval capabilities for textual resources. I have always felt that my primary task as a professor of art history was to get the students to the work of art itself so that it could speak directly to them. But in order to bring about that result, I had to give them some idea of the meaning of the work and to set it in an appropriate stylistic and cultural context. And in order to do that, I needed reproductions of the works. Reproductions evolved from the casts and copies of paintings that graced every respectable art school to engravings, to black-and-white University Prints, and then to beautifully printed art books by Abrams, Skira, and others. The development of 35-mm slides, which permitted a greater use of color, replaced the large lantern slides that were used in the 1940s and 1950s; however, the price paid for color in the more convenient format was a loss of quality. This change was not * Standardized systems for image resources * Legal access to huge archives of images * Storage, speed, and bandwidth * Reconceptualization of the way we teach If machines are to be able to talk with each other and if human beings are to be able to find the materials they want, standards are necessary. Although computer makers and 1. It is interesting that one of the oldest institutions is taking the lead in the newest technologies. Funds from preservation efforts are increasingly being used to scan full text resources, although few are available on-line at the present time. Undertakings like the van Eyck project of information exchange between European art libraries are designed to enable photographic archives and collections to exchange both text and image information in electronic format. See Colum Hourihane, "The Van Eyck Project," VRA Bulletzn, XXIII, no. 2, Summer 1996, 57-60. 2. For example, the CDs from the National Gallery in London published by Microsoft Home; the Frick Collection, the Egyptian Collection from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Joe Price Collection of Japanese Art published by Digital Collections Inc. (now Digital Arts and Sciences Corporation); and A PasszonforArt, a CD of the elusive Barnes Collection published by Corbis, to namejust a few. 3. Economics point to even greater growth in this medium when one compares the prices charged for catalogues to the major exhibition Splendors of Imperial Chzna held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with the price of a CD. The large hardback catalogue with 426 plates cost 85.00,andasmallerpaperbackselectionwith120platessoldfor85.00, and a smaller paperback selection with 120 plates sold for 85.00,andasmallerpaperbackselectionwith120platessoldfor29.95, the same price as an interactive CD containing 474 images plus details, audio pronunciation of Chinese terms and names, maps, chronologies, and the ability to "unroll" a virtual scroll. 4. See Diedra Stam, "Shared Access to Visual Images-The Potential of the Web, " VRA Bulletzn, xxIII, no. 2, Summer 1996. In September 1993, Mosaic, the first graphic browser, changed forever the way people communicated. Since then the Web has virtually exploded. At the time of writing, Digital's Altavista search engine indexed more than 30,000,000 documents located on 225,000 servers, with more being added daily. 5. For the issues involved, see David Bearman, "Overview and Discussion Points,"

Art History Now: Technology, Information, and Practice

International Journal of Digital Art history, 2020

The last twenty has seen our reliance on digital technology for the practice of art history grow alongside the emergence of what is called the digital humanities. Yet the discourse around digital humanities has thus far failed to articulate, explicitly or consistently, the true stakes of technologies’ influence on the humanities, much less art history. This article therefore seeks to reframe the debate. It argues that we should focus not on the digital or the computer, but instead on the but instead on the dynamic interrelationship between the institutions and domains responsible for the management of art historical information and those of the production of art historical knowledge. More specifically, it examines how recent technological developments are shifting priorities and processes within such institutions and thus shaping and reshaping art-historical practice.

Introduction to Pamela Fletcher, "Reflections on Digital Art History," (caa.reviews, 2015)

caa.reviews, 2015

ReViews: Field Editors' Reflections caa.reviews With "Reflections on Digital Art History," caa.reviews inaugurates a new field of coverage, since our future is now. In fact, immediately prior to drafting these remarks, I noticed a headline on Hyperallergic.com asking, "Can an algorithm determine art history's most creative paintings?" I was only curious enough to skim a paragraph or two, yet surely many of us sympathize with the convergence it represents. On the one hand, popular imagination and political rhetoric have increasingly figured the humanities as superfluous to the needs of civilization. On the other, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) research has given us tremendous computational powers and capacities for information storage and dissemination.

Art History 2.0. A humanistic discipline in the age of virtuality

2012

Der Vortrag wurde am 31.5.2012 anlasslich der Eroffnung des Getty-Research Portals am Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles gehalten. (http://portal.getty.edu/portal/landing). In diesem Portal, das zur Zeit die Retrodigitalisate von einem halben Dutzend europaischer und amerikanischer Bibliotheken integriert, sollen langfristig alle kunsthistorisch relevanten und copyright-freien Texte gespeichert und dem interessierten Nutzer und der Nutzerin angeboten werden. Gegenstand des Vortrages waren einige Reflexionen uber innovative Verwendungsweisen solcher online vorliegender Quellen. Daruber hinaus habe ich versucht, Perspektiven aufzuzeigen, die die internet-gestutzte kunsthistorische Arbeit in Zukunft kennzeichnen werden.