CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D Candidate Andrianna Campbell attended the American Art and Digital Scholarship Conference at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, held last week (November 15-16, 2013). It seemed like a meeting of minds that would produce discussion and collaboration that would chime well with the aims of THATCamp at CAA 2014. We asked her to reflect on the same questions we’ve been posing to our other posters, and on the conference itself. 

My involvement with digital art history currently involves the use of pedagogical tools for my classes at Parsons The New School of Design, an e-book about collaborative practice to which I am co-contributing a chapter and a curatorial project, Decenter, which began at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center in New York and has now traveled to the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University in Washington DC. The latter demanded rigorous participation from me and Daniel Palmer, my co-curator.

In Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show, we proposed an atemporal comparison of abstraction in 1913 and abstraction today. Much abstraction today is mediated through digital technology. The exhibition took place in the gallery (off-line) and decenterarmory.com (on-line) and expanded to include over 500 participants. Because of this exhibit, I was invited by the Archives of American Art (AAA) to attend their American Art and Digital Scholarship symposium held on November 15 and participate in the accompanying workshop on November 16. As we know, the AAA and other Smithsonian Institutions have been in the throes of a widespread and rapid digitalization campaign; their main concern has been the use of digital tools as a means for searching, organizing and archiving information. As a retrieval tool, the Internet is certainly without parallel but the aim of these two gatherings was to move beyond these fundamental concerns. By sharing new digital methodologies for examining data, mapping and visualizing material, scholars/practitioners illuminated their current and future impact on academic research, curatorial projects and pedagogical prospects and thus their transformative influence on the study of American Art.

Digital visualization informed all of the papers at the AAA Symposium. There is something about manifesting abstract data into something seen that has been at the forefront of other disciplinary practice, but has only recently been a burgeoning aspect of research in the humanities. For example, Laura Wexler and Lauren Tilton presented “Revisioning the Archive: The Photogrammar Project” in which they use the catalog of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn et al to create a diagrammatic map, which can be searched temporally, thematically, geographically and incorporates historical census data for a richer understanding of the period. During the workshop, Wexler elaborated on her view of the project as a means to overcome the “digital divide,” a term that she uses to problematize the high-tech gaps seen in users from different social classes or male and female contributors. She points out that young lower-class male voices are well represented online, but less so for educated females, who make up less than 15% of contributors to Wikipedia.

In my own research, I call attention to this as an instance of “historical erasure” that is so common when we maintain similar patriarchal narratives on the Internet as we previously did offline and repost the equivalent information as if it were new. The “digital divide” or “historical erasure” is a major concern of my analysis of the archive. One of the works from Decenter is Andrea Geyer’s Indelible, which shows the names of 9 of the 50 women who were originally featured in the 1913 Armory show, but do not make it into the canonical history of that exhibition. As scholars, we have to be careful of the Internet’s seemingly democratic presentation, which occludes its ability to re-present problematic one-sided information. As researchers, we have to integrate new perspectives and present them online, where there is the potential for mass access. Other projects, from David Sledge’s “When and Where Did They Paint? Schematizing Landscape with the Inventory of American Paintings” to Titia Hulst’s “Documenting the Postwar Audience for American Avant-Garde Art” used mapping technologies to give us geographical or informational maps, which allow us to propose alternative art histories. The full presentations can be watched here.

The workshop on November 16 distilled these major concerns into four categories— Access & Pedagogy, Data Management, Research Methodology & e-Publishing, and the creation of a Tool Kit for Scholars. Attendees at the workshop included Kate Haw, the Director of the Archives of American Art, Kelly Quinn from the Terra Foundation’s Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives, Emily Shapiro, the Executive Editor for American Art, Louisa Ruby from the Frick Library, Hilary Culbertson, Program Coordinator of HASTAC and other curators and doctoral candidates with an interest in the topic. The conversation was lively and groups generated project proposals that will certainly benefit the field in the future.

I found that the most pressing issue, the scattered and often piecemeal initiatives of so many major organizations, was not addressed. From my conversations with curators at Rhizome and the New Museum, and constructors of visualization projects at the Getty—I know that similar workshops and discussions have been happening for curators of contemporary art for the past decade. How can we bridge this divide between the scholars of a history of American Art pre-1985 and those of art with digital tools post-1989? We are all asking the same questions and in many cases require overlapping and similar solutions. By bringing together scholars from disparate fields with multiple funding options, I hope that innovations can be shared across platform, and perhaps approach our democratic ideals of digital technologies. THATCamp CAA in Chicago should certainly address this issue since they are in a wonderful position to do so.

Andrianna Campbell is a PhD candidate in Art History and Graduate Teaching Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Centre as well as an Adjunct Lecturer at Parsons, The New School for Design. She received a BFA (2001) in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.