Renee McGarry is the senior instructional designer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. (All views expressed here are her own.) She also participated in THATCamp CAA 2013, and was willing to answer our four broad questions on the state of “digital art histories” today, as she sees it.

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

My involvement with digital art history currently feels really scattered, particularly because I’ve found it difficulty to settle in a community of scholars and teachers. My current position at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art affords me a lot of time to think about digital pedagogy, and I enjoy doing so largely by working with faculty to add digital tools and projects to their in-person and online classrooms.
I was really lucky to be involved with the launch of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in 2006-2007, as I initially worked on creating entries for the exhibition’s wiki. This was really my first exposure to the concept of a wiki and while I am not sure the whole wiki project itself was successful, I think it was a great initial foray into the field of what we’re now calling digital art history. Since then I’ve started working on a digital companion to my dissertation which will allow it to be read in a non-linear fashion, much closer to the ways in which Mesoamericans read manuscripts than the traditional book format. There are a couple of other projects I have on the back burner that involve crowdsourcing and working with digital tools that I hope can come to fruition really soon.

I also with with Ananda Cohen Suarez, assistant professor of colonial Latin American visual culture at Cornell, to maintain a blog, Latin America Visualized. (Of course, this brings up the question of whether or not blogging “counts” as digital scholarship, since I’ve seen plenty of people argue that it doesn’t!)  This project has allowed me really to think about the question of audience when it comes to the internet, something that I discussed at a CAA 2013 session in tandem with a paper presented by Dr. Charlotte Frost as well (especially in reference to Twitter, and I chose to open this paper up to edits while I presented it).

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

Goodness, what AREN’T the most pressing issues in the field of digital art history! Part of me wants to just make a list: creating community, scholars learning to collaborate, scholars learning to be kinder to each other about works in progress, scholars thinking about presenting works in progress, teachers thinking about how to bring digital research and tools into the classroom, open access, open access, open access, the gendering of our labor, and, finally, something that’s become a bit of a pet rant of mine lately, digital labor. I want to focus on the last two, as I think they are the least discussed (unless it’s specifically in reference to whether or not something counts for tenure, a conversation I’d really like to see change). Teachers and scholars MUST start documenting the time and efforts that go into the labor of creating open educational resources, digital scholarly projects, online textbooks, and whatever else they are doing. Right now so many (hell, most!) of us are doing this for free! And while it’s nice to be all lovey and sharey about things, our work has to be documented or we (especially graduate students, junior faculty, and other contingent academic workers) will keep having to do it for free. In fact, it will become another expectation, another line on the CV that MUST be there! Do we really need to add another one of those to an everchanging and shrinking academic job market? I’d like to see people continue on with their work but really force this conversation.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Museums and open access. I’ve been really excited about the developments coming out of a number of institutions lately, and I hope to see it continue, and, then of course, broaden into conversations about what we do with the images and resources now that we have them.

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

Building scholarly community, what that means, and how we do it in (digital) art history. Do we rely on institutions like CAA, and when they don’t provide a means to build community how do we do it without them? I often feel incredibly isolated, and I recognize that I am actually very connected! It’s also nice to have a way to get started in digital art history that isn’t just on your own, something to think about too!