Pamela M. Fletcher is Professor of Art History & Chair of Department & Co-Director of the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, Bowdoin College, and one of the organizers of THATCamp CAA 2014.

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

I first became interested in digital art history methods as a way of figuring out when and where the commercial art gallery originated in London. That research question led to the London Gallery Project, which my co-author David Israel and I completed in 2007 but didn’t publish until Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide launched their “Digital Humanities and Art History” series in 2012. That opportunity to think through the larger questions raised by digital methods in the study of the art market, in collaboration with Anne Helmreich, really sparked my thinking and led directly to my involvement in Bowdoin’s new curricular initiative in Digital and Computational Studies. As part of that program, I am planning on teaching a senior seminar on Digital Art History at Bowdoin in 2014-15. I’m really looking forward to THATCamp CAA 2014 as an opportunity to gather ideas for that course.

2. What is one of the most pressing issues in the field of “digital art history” today?

What level of computational literacy is necessary for art historians to take up serious digital scholarship? How will we develop that expertise? How will we teach it to our students – at what levels and in what contexts?

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Well, that depends what kind of innovation you mean! I think that technological innovation is still happening primarily outside art history, and that we need to be talking to computer scientists and other people with computational expertise as they design and build new tools. And some of us will need or want to develop that expertise ourselves. The innovations within art history are of a different order, as scholars begin to rethink the kinds of questions (and the scale of questions) they can ask, and realize that collaboration – with computer scientists, designers, and other art historians – is a fundamental part of digital scholarship. This fact challenges many of our assumptions about how art historians (and other humanists) work and how their work is published and evaluated, and is one of the most exciting and challenging innovations I see the digital world bringing to the discipline.