1. What is your current involvement with “digital art history”?

My current involvement with digital art history is a little spread out: I co-founded and maintain a digital art history resource, arthistoryteachingresources.org; I blog and write about art history online in a number of places, including art21 and artwrit; and I’m currently helping to organize THATcamp at CAA 2014 as the graduate student representative (I’m currently a Ph. D candidate in Art History at The CUNY Graduate Center in New York).

2. What is one of the most pressing issues in the field of “digital art history” today?
As someone who will be graduating fairly soon and entering the job market I’m interested in the ways digital art history will change the field that I will engage with during my career as a teacher and a researcher. I think digital art history has great potential for facilitating access to knowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration, and peer-to-peer research.  However there is still resistance to, for example, online publication versus traditional print publication. I think one this is one of the most pressing issues in the field – recognizing online publications and digital forms of art history as “real work.” Those who hold the reins can be resistant to change, which makes the Digital Humanities and digital art history precarious to invest time and sweat in if they are not recognized as academic output. But, I think those definitions are changing, and fast.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

One of the things I’m most proud of being involved with is creating online syllabi so students in my art history survey classes don’t have to buy expensive textbooks but can still have access to quality materials which help them to engage with and explore art history and its myriad forms. I think open educational resources are the way forward, but they must be properly supported during their research and development. I think it’s really important that quality open educational resources should count towards tenure portfolios in order to encourage all faculty to contribute to this innovative way of knowledge sharing. Who determines quality in this new field, though? How can it be peer-reviewed? These questions interest me.

4. What’s the panel or issue you’d most like to see proposed for THATCamp CAA in Chicago?

One of the most pressing issues in the humanities is the massive contingent labor pool and the difficulties associated with being a teacher and researcher within such precarious circumstances. I am interested in how the field of digital art history intersects with this issue. I’d like to see a panel around the politics and ethics of labor in art history today and the ways that digital art history can meet, manage and push these issues forward rather than exploit them.