Happy New Year! The organizers of THATCamp 2014 hope you had a restful holiday. We’re getting excited that THATCamp is just over one month away. We’ll be releasing the list of confirmed speakers and requesting session proposals over the next few days. Here on the blog, we’ll be asking confirmed speakers and participants to get involved in the pre-unconference discussion. First up: Tara Zepel.

Tara is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her current research focuses on the social and cultural ‘situatedness’ of visualization. She is also a dedicated teacher, a member of the Software Studies Lab, and HASTAC Scholar. Her unconference presentation will look at the role of visualization in digital art history and, more broadly, the digital humanities. Using the free software ImagePlot and UCLA’s Hypercities project as key examples, she’ll invite discussion on whether visualization is best characterized as a tool, a method/process, or something else? In doing so, she hopes to encourage conversation about new ways of knowing, thinking and communicating cultural scholarship.

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

My current involvement with digital art history is a bit scattered. I am PhD candidate in Art History, at the University of California, San Diego writing a dissertation on the social and cultural ‘situatedness’ of data visualization. I have worked as a member of the Software Studies Lab to create a number of visualization projects and a free software tool ImagePlot, which visualizes collections of images and video of any size.  I spend a lot of time thinking about the interdisciplinary nature of art. And I’ve organized a HASTAC forum on Visualization Across Disciplines.

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

The funny thing is, I don’t feel much like an art historian; and I would guess that many of the people attending this conference might feel the same way (at least some of the time). This is, I think, one of the most pressing issues in our field. How do we define who is an art historian? Who has access to cultural material? What counts as art historical scholarship? The answers to such questions are in flux and rather large in scope. Yet, it is just as important to take time to reflect upon them and modify them as the tools and technology we use. Like beta version software, they may also need to be tweaked depending on field-wide goals and needs.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Innovation happens in collaboration. I think this is one of the fundamental ideas of digital art history. The question is collaboration between what? Or whom? Often, the answer is between art historical scholarship and new technology or tools. But we can also consider the innovation that results from art historians collaborating with new social practices or institutions, new forms of media, or even viewers. Each of these collaborations leads to different types of innovation within the field. I also think it is important to consider innovation in the other direction – that is digital art historical scholarship has or might affect technological development and other disciplinary fields.

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

I’m going to have to echo Christine Sundt’s answer to this question: “Rethinking methods courses for students of art history. What should students know and when should they know it?” How we teach art history and what constitutes literacy in the field are key issues to think about as digital art history continues to develop.