Francesca is currently the Research Assistant to the head of Digital Art History at the Getty Research Institute and working on her PhD in the department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. After gaining institutional experience with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smith College Museum of Art, her research focuses on the efficacy of digital tools and how they are reshaping the discipline of art history and quotidian cultural practices.

Tom is currently working at the Getty Research Institute as graduate intern in the department of Digital Art History. Previously, he worked on projects to encourage engagement with collections and develop online resources at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in London.

They’re going to be presenting a talk titled “Getty Scholars’ Workspace: Developing tools, methods, and standards for conducting and publishing original research in digital form.” After starting with several prototype projects that were presented at THATCamp CAA 2013 in New York, we would like to offer an update to the Getty Scholars’ Workspace project.  The Getty Research Institute is working to develop tools, methods, and standards for conducting and publishing original art-historical research in digital form. In this next phase, we are examining what is entailed in moving from an internal workspace to a publicly available publication in the digital age, and how to build and share a flexible online environment and set of protocols that can be used by multiple institutions around the world.

*

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

We both focus on the development of tools, methods, and standards for conducting and publishing original research in digital form. Currently working with institutions such as the University of Málaga, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, and soon with the Columbia University, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Université de Reims, we support research projects that take place in an online environment.  Through the course of the research processes we have tried to recognize and replicate the working patterns of art historians, anticipating and adapting the tools we are building to suit their needs. Eventually we will release the toolset to the community as open-source software based on the Drupal platform.

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

Where to begin? Do you start by making digital resources available for all of the analogue materials you rely on, or do you start with a singular project and produce resources and tools as and when they are required? It seems that in an imaginary Venn diagram showing rings of ‘resources’, ‘software’, and ‘expertise’ with ‘digital scholarship’ at the center, there is always at least one element holding back progress.

Digital Art History seems to be at a crossroads: where scholars must begin to learn how to work with technical tools and technical experts, perhaps gaining new insights into their material through the process, and institutional/organizational structures need to change and allow for deep collaborations between technologists and art historians, where each begin to settle on a common language and workflow.

3.  Where do you see innovations happening?

As Murtha Baca outline in a forthcoming new piece in Visual Resources, new protocols such as Linked Open Data make it possible to access, download, link to, and share large structured data. Relinquishing institutional control and allowing this material to be consumed and repurposed is an exciting prospect. It seems that, rather than hoarding scholarship internally, the movement towards a more democratic distribution of knowledge is where innovation will happen. We hope that this will result in a broader analysis, disrupting traditional binaries between centers and peripheries.

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

The discipline of Art History undeniably drags its feet behind many of the other humanities. Since, in most cases, the methodologies and apparatus that scholars rely on lend themselves to analogue scholarship, the question becomes: where and how can digital tools contribute in a meaningful way to working practices? We can approximate practices, but is imitation really the same as innovation?  How can working with digital tools lead us to ask new questions within the discipline of art history? How do we better prepare the next generation of scholars to use the gains of technology without detracting from the importance of good research?

Pappas earned her PhD from the University of Southern California. An Associate Professor at Santa Clara University, she teaches courses on American art, women and the visual arts, and the history of photography. She is a contributing editor to Teaching Art History with Technology: Reflections and Case Studies (2008), the fruit of a long-standing interest in the potential of technology to advance teaching and scholarship on many fronts. Twenty years ago she co-founded the scholarly listserv AmArt-L for scholars of American art, still a going concern. In a related phase of her career she lectured widely on teaching art history with technology, she has been a consultant, on and off, for a couple of major textbook publishers’ electronic learning projects, and she continues to participate in conferences and conference sessions treating pedagogy. Her publications in museum catalogs examine the second generation of the New York School, art of the 1960s, and women artists. Her current research interests are two-pronged: moving forward with a continuing commitment to improving undergraduate education, and working on a book-length study of women–some of them Jewish–and the visual arts in the U.S. She hasn’t played Galaga but she used to be OK at Space Invaders.

*

I am starting this blog post with a little history; we have arrived at that happy place wherein some art historians reading this were in middle school when “techno-teaching” in art history first off the ground. Twenty years ago a few art historians saw the potential that digital technology offered to the discipline in teaching and research. Those projects blossomed around the country: Princeton (Marilyn Lavin), Amherst (Laetita La Follette), USC (Andrea Pappas), SJSU (Kathleen Cohen) give some idea of the geographic spread. Ten years ago Eastman Kodak ceased its production of slide projectors, boosting changes in the pedagogy of Art History launched in the mid-1990s. These anniversaries offer an opportunity for reflection on the interchange between technology and teaching in our discipline and some thoughts on what this future looks like now.

The early explorers sought to discover new ways of engaging students once we were unshackled from the side by side comparisons dictated by the slide projector. Turning the lights on and teaching in a lab rather than a lecture hall offered opportunities for engaging students in small groups in class, experimenting with active learning strategies, and enabling better teacher-student interactions. Some projects were modest, relying mostly on available tools and technology at a single institution (e.g., Netscape 1, early wiki-type spaces, hypercard, email) to open multiple paths through the material and to open synchronous and asynchronous channels of communication in the class community. Others secured large external grants to produce multi-institution, large projects that developed new tools and learning modules to visualize monuments and archeological sites, enabling new kinds of student interaction with images. Librarians, programmers, and pedagogical specialists proved to be key collaborators in all these endeavors. In every case, a drive to improve student learning—and in some cases, faculty research—fueled the projects.

These first came to the attention of the wider discipline in 1997 in a CAA session (Learning Digitally: Glossy Gadgets or 21^st Century Chalk?) sponsored by the CAA Committee on Electronic Information and chaired by Ellen Schiferl. The advent of digital tech in the classroom accelerated ongoing discussions about the canon and helped refocus the discipline’s global gaze. That year the Art Bulletin gave digital art history serious consideration in a section entitled “Digital Cultures and the Practices of Art History.” Publishers soon followed by supplementing textbooks with online study tools, which continue to grow in number and evolve in sophistication. We also formed organizations around digital art history: Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology (AHPT) became affiliated with CAA in 2003 and Computers and the History of Art. (CHArt) was organized in England in 1985. In the background, scholars exchanged ideas, syllabi, assignments, and teaching tips on scholarly listservs, a technological development which we now take for granted but which changed the discipline in ways too numerous to discuss here. In short, digital art history now has a fast-growing presence within the discipline and is here to stay.

For some years now we have been using digital interfaces in the classroom whether we welcomed the change or fought it tooth and nail, hoarding slide projector bulbs like squirrels preparing for a new ice age. PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi have assisted with the basic issue of image access for students—we began posting images and slide shows to a website, or later, embedding them in course management systems—a big improvement over slide carousels locked to clunky study viewers in the library basement. Yet, most of us settled down to more or less replicating the Wolfflinian side-by-side comparisons in our classroom presentations. It was easy to replicate this teaching practice digitally but other pedagogical options proved to be more difficult and time consuming, and hence more elusive.

The key innovation that digital technology brought to teaching has not been image access but the synchronous and asynchronous communication—blogs and wikis (the “next gen” of pre-1990s electronic b-boards) and other collaborative spaces—that it enables. These, with the aid of the “flipped” classroom, have allowed us to avail ourselves of the enormous literature of pedagogy, particularly the recent work in brain-based learning. Historically, most innovation in digital art history teaching practice happened at the level of first year classes—large surveys (or what has taken their place)—changes there affect the largest number of students and yield the biggest bang for tech buck. Administrators and entrepreneurs now eye online courses, MOOCs, and free instruction (such as the Khan Academy) as outreach and as potential cost-cutting options.

Embedding meaningful undergraduate research in teaching has become a best practice (and a staple of STEM education) but the humanities—Art History included—lag far behind, partly because there is little history of collaborative teamwork in our discipline, but also because access to the raw materials of research off-campus is usually difficult. With the right tools and sufficient resources (the latter is no small barrier) we can now begin to collaborate with undergraduate students on research projects in pursuit of active learning, competency-based education, and the like. As archives and library special collections are digitized, access—now limited by travel and financial constraints—is improved. Similarly, access to museum collections online makes it much easier to go beyond the images in a text book or to teach topics for which there is no textbook (and never will be). Access to collections also supports research by faculty and independent scholars. These digital materials give us range for creativity in teaching and open up opportunities for student learning in the future.

What does this future look like? Data mining and data visualization will make statistical competence as important as the acquisition of languages has been in the past. This kind of numeracy will allow access not just to data but, more importantly, to ways of thinking that specialists in the humanities generally don’t have exposure to, much less practice in. Edward Tufte may become required reading in methods classes. Data mining will also allow us to craft different kinds of assignments for our students. Students, especially undergraduates, will face unprecedented opportunities to participate in faculty research projects.

Access of all kinds—to images, data, documents, and tools, equipment, and funding—present ongoing challenges. The new developments discussed above can further democratize the field, closing gaps of opportunity created by geography, type of institution, field of study, and so forth. However, in the background of all this we should hear sounded cautionary notes about costs of infrastructure and maintenance in terms of budgets; also about expenditures of faculty time. In the early days advanced grad students, adjunct faculty and very senior faculty made up the pioneers—people with nothing to lose, or with enough institutional clout to make things happen. We tend to think about students when thinking about tech and teaching but we should also think about ourselves—where does the money come from to support technology and support staff? How do technology costs impact budgets for faculty research that doesn’t necessarily use digital technology (i.e., old fashioned travel)? Is there sufficient staff to support the upgrading, changing, and learning curve of learning management and data visualization software? Is this just one more administrative task piled on top of already full faculty plates?

Historically, once on the tenure track, faculty involvement in digital initiatives tended to drop off due to increased administrative demands, pressure to publish in conventional venues for tenure or promotion, and a widespread perception that pedagogical research is fluffy or that publications in this area aren’t “real” art history. Some of this has roots in the old (and gendered!) cultural division between teaching and practice; some of it in the market—high-profile institutions such as the Terra Foundation and the Getty support the research end of digital art history, but pedagogy generally gets less attention. Art History Teaching Resources’ Kress grant is thus a welcome step in this direction. Art history would do well to take a page from chemistry’s book; pedagogical research in chemistry is well-respected, well-funded, is a session track at the annual meetings on par with other areas of the discipline, and has its own journals and book series. We would also benefit by looking to rhetoric and composition for pedagogical research models, collaborative practices, and again, respect for disciplinary pedagogy as a field of inquiry in its own right. If we take teaching seriously, it also behooves us to participate in interdisciplinary conferences dedicated to innovative pedagogy such as the Lilly Conferences on College and University Teaching. We need to endow pedagogical inquiry and innovation in art history with disciplinary capital, recognizing that pedagogical research drives changes in the discipline by inculcating new ways of thinking and learning in subsequent generations of our practitioners.

*

AHPT: Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology Website has reports on its CAA events and an annotated list of organizations and resources useful to art historians who are interested productively employing technology in service of pedagogy.

CHArt: Computers and the History of Art. Website has a guide to the organization’s publications and other resources.

Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies. Still the only volume specifically addressing the intersection of pedagogy and technology, in addition to the case studies it provides a bibliography on the pedagogy of art history.

Lilly Conferences on College and University Teaching. Lilly conferences have a unique format: rather than one gigantic annual meeting with hundreds of people reading papers, there are several small, regional conferences every year, with the individual presentations structured as mini-workshops.

Smarthistory Khan Academy’s open access educational resource for art history.

Art History Teaching Resources A virtual community to support teaching, and thinking about teaching, in art history.

Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera. She is the author of net art works, like “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which have appeared in The Iowa Review Web, and multimedia performances and installations, like When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce networked multimedia narratives. She is a recipient, with Stuart Moulthrop, of a 2013 NEH Start Up grant for a digital preservation project for early born digital media. She is President of the Electronic Literature Organization and Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews.

Her talk at THATCamp CAA 2014 is titled “AppArt Issues:  Producing, Publishing and Preserving”

*

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

For the last decade or so, I have been curating “born digital” media art and find it an interesting challenge to draw an audience together to experience works in a public space, particularly when the exhibited works are found online and, so, already accessible to the audience on their computers and smart devices. I am also working, with my colleague, Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), on methods for preserving the experience that comes with interaction with and participation in early born digital work, and we are writing about the outcomes in an multimedia, digital book.

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

Contemporaneous obsolescence––that is obsolescence occurring almost as soon as the art has been completed. Obsolescence has long been a problem when working with media art, but the speed at which technology is advancing has rendered works produced less than a decade ago inaccessible without an emulator or translation into a new platform. Artists are expected to push the envelop on methods, media, technologies, to see what can be made out of them, to experiment and explore––yet, have to be aware the durability of their work not “over time” but within a few years. These two concerns are not compatible.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Computer generated art; mobile media; sensor-based work stemming from Leap Motion, Kinect, Falcon, Arduino; 3D printing; AR and VR

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

Hybrid media art forms like electronic literature

Multimedia digital artists books

Media art collaborations with social science, humanities, and science

Nancy Ross is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah and a speaker at THATCamp CAA 2014. She led the TICE ART 1010 development team in 2011 and is the Contributing Editor for Medieval Art for Smarthistory at Khan Academy. She blogs about teaching art history at experiementsinarthistory.blogspot.com/.

The working title for her THATCamp presentation is “Students Respond to Teaching Twentieth Century Art History with Gender and Data Visualizations.” In my Twentieth Century Art History class last spring we focused on female artists and created a data visualization on the social networks of female artists. This presentation will highlight the project and student responses to the project.

*

Murtha Baca and Anne Helmreich outlined five phases of digital humanities that serve as a model for digital art history. Their work is valuable to me as I try to find my way through research projects that fall within the purview of digital humanities and figure out a research direction for the future. But I think that they miss a key step, which is the teaching of digital art history. And not just to grad students, but to undergrads too. Perhaps especially to undergrads.

Many of our undergrads live in a digital world. When we discuss, learn about, and research art history using social media, online content, and digital tools, we are discussing art history in a way that will make more sense to them than learning out of a traditional textbook, which they may or may not be able to understand. I recently gave a talk at Weber State University where I presented the idea that our traditional textbooks are rendered useless if our students do not have college-level reading skills. I saw a lot of faculty heads nod in agreement. This is the reality that we encounter when we teach at open-admissions institutions. We spend a lot of class time remediating textbook reading assignments, which reduces the amount of time that we spend on other learning activities.

Today, digital textbooks like Smarthistory at Khan Academy can replace traditional ones, especially when we use them in combination with other digital teaching resources, most of which are freely available online. But teaching digital art history isn’t just about replacing a textbook with online content. It’s about creating new narratives in art history and allowing our students to share in that process. If we want to understand the sexist and racist underpinnings of the art history that we’ve learned throughout our careers, practicing digital art history in the classroom will help us get there. There is no better way to stick it to The Man than to text-mine The Man’s writings and reveal his biases.

We don’t have to know how to code to teach digital art history in the undergraduate classroom, as there are plenty of tools out there that we can easily use to demonstrate the principles and benefits of digital art history, whether they are online (perhaps translated) texts, Google image searches, text mining tools, or data visualization tools. We can be as sophisticated as Omeka or as simple as Pinterest when we teach students to collect and analyze art for themselves. Perhaps we may even venture as far as spreadsheets and databases, quantifying and coding, all the while tweeting their process, observations, and questions for fellow students and scholars beyond their classroom.

Digital research/teaching methods help our students develop critical thinking, especially as they encounter and challenge the way that art history is presented to them. Learning digital art history allows students to experiment with constructing their own narratives of art history, fully immersing them in the research process. Our students needed digital art history yesterday.

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, professor of the history of art, has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Maryland. She kindly agreed to reflect on our THATCamp questions.

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

I let statistics gleaned from honorable databases guide me to art historical insights.  The profusion of art historical database material is a major innovation for which to be grateful.  I would like to see a site where privately created research databases could be brought together, enhanced, corrected, made public and shared.

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

Curtailment of ideas and insights owing to less-than-universal open access to visual material for scholarly purposes is the biggest blight on the profession of art history.  The battle against using research material as a profit-making commodity should be ceaseless (and victorious)

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Innovation is happening in the classroom where many new and wonderful technical elements are being manipulated for pedagogical purposes.  Since no one makes programs designed for scholarship and/or teaching, invention’s mother has created remarkable new types of interaction with students.  With any luck, these on-the-fly stimuli will ultimately change the way art history is written.

A.L. McMichael is a PhD candidate in Byzantine art history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a research fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been active in various GC Digital Initiatives—including the New Media Lab and the Digital Fellows program—for several years. She’ll be presenting–alongside Meredith Brown–a lightening talk titled “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing” (more details here).

*

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

In terms of my personal work, I’m interested in how we convey spaces and rituals to museum-goers and students, how to better merge a study of places with material culture objects. Digital projects can go a long way toward this—3D models, interactive maps and timelines, reconstructions, virtual reality are all being used to great effect. But how do we do this without distracting from the monuments and objects themselves—what’s the right balance?

I’m also excited about the possibilities of incorporating digital elements into art history dissertations in a manageable way. My dissertation is on rock-cut architecture in Byzantine Cappadocia (central Turkey), and I’m creating a digital catalog of monuments as part of it. Another ongoing project, Documenting Cappadocia, is my website on a similar topic, which I’ve used for experimenting with tools, presentation, and information architecture.

In the grander scheme of things, I look forward to the day we drop the “digital” for a more inclusive definition of art history and all its methods.

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

Open access and Linked data! Not only how institutions can make their resources open and connected, but how small projects and individuals (i.e. dissertations) can contribute to public scholarship through networks of likeminded researchers.

Where do you see innovations happening?

I see innovations happening when projects consider sustainability from day one, often with the help of librarians or archivists. All art historians can learn a lot from archaeologists. So many of them are thinking about best practice for recording data, sharing it, working collaboratively, interpreting it for various audiences. Open Context is a good example of this, and a number of other examples are found within ancient and medieval studies, specifically in the Linked Ancient World Data Initiative (LAWDI), wherein participants make a concerted effort to contribute and reuse data in order build interdisciplinary connections.

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

We need to better train art historians (at all levels) to peer review digital projects, hopefully steering credit and funding toward more digital work moving forward.

Renee’s reflections on digital labor make me wonder if this issue can be intertwined with a discussion on how to evaluate digital scholarship.

Liz McDermott is Managing Editor, Web and Communications, at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. She oversees the development, production, and publication of all content on the GRI website and related social media platforms. At THATCamp CAA 2014, she’ll be presenting a lightening talk titled, “Bridging the Gap: Presenting Scholarly Content on Social Media Platforms.” She describes the outline thus: “Recently we pinned a collection of the first photographs of Mayan sites to our Pinterest board and posted an album of pages from German artist Otto Mühl’s sketchbook on our Facebook page. Both resources come from the GRI’s vast Special Collections. Cultivating a social media presence is an opportunity for cultural institutions to disseminate resources and share information on a scale that was unheard of even 10 years ago. We know that outlets like Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are powerful communication tools; our challenge is to develop ways to take traditional, scholarly art-historical content and present it in a way that is professional and rigorously accurate, yet also takes into account the casual, conversational tone that is inherent in social media.”

*

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

Most of my work relates to digital access and dissemination of resources. Except for a handful of print pieces, everything I do at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) has a digital destination, whether it’s our website or a specific social media application such as YouTube or Facebook. The website contains nearly 8,000 HTML pages that provide access to, or share information about the GRI’s research resources. There are sections about scholarly events (including video documentation of lectures and symposiums) and exhibitions, pages that connect readers to a dozen specialized research databases, sections that provide information on what is contained in our vast Special Collections of archives and rare materials, and digitized books, images, podcasts, and other media. Similarly, we use social media to expand our reach to art historians.

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

There are many complicated and pressing issues, but two of the most fundamental ones are access and training.

Access: A 1937 essay by H.G. Wells, “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia,” imagined a world in which a “Permanent World Encyclopaedia” might “pull the mind of the world together.” Of course, in many ways this has come true through the Internet, with images, photographs, films, and writing available across more than 644 million active websites (as of 2012, according to Business Insider.) Such easy access to human knowledge would seem to be a natural fit for art historians, especially since art history scholarship has traditionally been complicated by the inaccessibility of research materials and especially images. And yet, only a small fraction of art-historical materials are currently available online. Complications with image rights, the need for institutional infrastructure, and the deep resources needed to get material up and online, are huge challenges.

Training: “Teens are (over) confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.” (Hoa Loranger and Jakob Nielson, 2013 reporting on website usability tests conducted with teenagers) Contrary to popular belief, young people are not more facile with technology, and yet somehow this myth persists. Scholars need easy and ongoing access to quality training on using and developing digital tools, and cultural institutions need the resources to properly test and develop these tools.

3.   Where do you see innovations happening?

OSCI, the Online Scholarly Cataloging Initiative, went a long way toward helping museums make the transition from printed volumes to multimedia, web-based publications. Launched by the Getty Foundation in 2009, the initiative supported eight other institutions in the creation of a suite of tools to facilitate the publishing and dissemination of online scholarly catalogues for art history.

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

Increasingly, scholarly work is being done on the web, but is largely unrecognized and undiscovered by undergraduate and graduate students and fellow researchers in the discipline. How can a process be developed for deciding how quality scholarship should be defined (or redefined) in the digital age? Is it possible to develop a scholarly publishing model that applies the best in traditional academic rigor to the digital world?

Meredith A Brown is the Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is co-editor of Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Collaborative Practices in Art, Architecture and Film (2015), a peer-reviewed digital book; her current project is on feminist institution building in Lower Manhattan. She holds a PhD and MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA from Stanford University. She’s going to be presenting at THATCamp alongside A.L. McMichael,  a PhD candidate in Byzantine art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and also a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A.L. has been active in various GC Digital Initiatives—including the New Media Lab and the Digital Fellows program—for several years. Together, they’ll present a lightening talk titled, “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing.”

Their lightening talk description? For early career and emerging scholars in the field of art history, the world of digital publishing is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, it can provide innovative and interactive ways to present research; on the other, digital-only publications tend to be seen as less prestigious, less rigorous, and ultimately less useful for career advancement than more traditional (paper) publishing. In an open discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of online publishing, we will ask how digital writing might allow us to “upcycle” other work–in online journals, blogs, and other formats–to create an online presence around our research, how online academic presses and the peer-review process might improve and legitimate digital publications, and whether such publishing initiatives in our field are worth it.

*

Meredith took a few minutes to answer the THATCamp questions:

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

I’m interested in collaboration as a general mode of working in the world and in particular in collaborative methods of research and writing in the humanities. Unsurprisingly, many of the most exciting initiatives around collaboration are happening through digital platforms, and that’s very exciting to me. At the moment I’m working with fellow art historian and THATCamp organizer Michelle Millar Fisher as co-editors of a collaboratively written book about collaborative practices in twentieth century art, architecture and film. Of course it’s going to be a digital publication, produced by Courtauld Books Online! And between now and then the fourteen contributing co-authors are generating a website reflective of our research process that will function as both a digital archive of the project and (hopefully) a future teaching tool.

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

Within my own work with digital publishing, issues of copyright and access are a constant headache; plus, it is still an uphill battle to ensure that genuinely scholarly publications–rigorously peer-reviewed, professionally edited, etc.–that appear as digital-only publications are given equal weight as traditionally published articles and books. This seems to be a particular struggle for early career scholars in the academic job market and tenure process.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

There are a number of institutions that seem like they might be rather old fashioned about things that have been doing really interesting open access digital publishing projects–the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Met, the Courtauld, the Getty, University of California Press…and the list is growing 

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

I know there are lots of really great things happening at the intersection of education and digital technology, and as I’ve been out of the teaching loop for a couple of years now, I’m really looking forward to learning about digital innovations in the teaching of art history.

Desi Gonzalez is graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a research assistant in HyperStudio. Previously, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art producing educational materials including as wall texts, audio tours, games, interactive learning spaces, and websites. Liam Andrew is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a research assistant in HyperStudio. With a background in literature, music, and software development, he is currently researching the history of information management and recommendation systems. Their presentation at THATCamp CAA is titled, “HyperStudio: Collaborating with Colleague and Cultural Institutions.”

*

Collaboration is an important part of our work in HyperStudio, MIT’s laboratory for the digital humanities. We’ll be presenting on a current HyperStudio project, which is a tool that will empower users to discover cultural events, exhibitions, and art objects in the Boston area. After a brief overview of the project, we’ll discuss how we are collaborate internally, with each researcher contributing different skills and knowledge, as well as how we are collaborating with museums to develop an effective tool that best serves their needs and complements existing digital and educational strategies.

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

At HyperStudio, we are investigating how digital tools can encourage discovery and serendipity in the humanities, with a specific focus on art objects and museum collections. We are developing a mobile application or website that will empower user to discover cultural events, exhibitions, and artworks in the Boston area. Instead of creating another listing or image-aggregating website, we’re interested in probing how a new tool could foster meaningful and sustained relationships with art. For example, let’s say you see and are fascinated by the Amy Sillman exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Our tool might then connect you to an animation workshop led by a contemporary artist at the Peabody Essex Museum, inform you about a lecture about feminism and the arts at Harvard, or point you to works in the Museum of Fine Arts collection by other artists who integrate cartoon elements into compositions. While digital media can provide ways to discover art online, our project aims to put people directly in front of works of art.

The principles underlying this new project is a concept that runs through many HyperStudio endeavors. For example, Annotation Studio is an open source web tool that aims to enhance the ways a student interacts with a text. A student can add multimedia annotations onto a text, search and link to other content, and ultimately engage in a more active reading of the text. The digital tool doesn’t overshadow the original text, but is instead an avenue to dig deeper into it. Like Annotation Studio, the goal of our new project is to privilege engagement with the art first.

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

Digital tools purport to democratize cultural heritage, bringing art out of the museum and academy walls and reconnecting the audience to the archive. They bear the promise of making art accessible to new kinds of audiences, forming a dialogue between the present and our cultural past. But online everyone is a curator, whether they know it or not; automatic recommendation systems look to users to filter their content. Where does that leave the role of the professional curator online? Are there ways to harness both expertise and collective taste, both online and in museums? How can digital tools encourage meaningful dialogue when these two signals are at odds?

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

More and more museums are opening up collection data and high resolution images of objects to the public. Institutions that are leading the charge in this impulse include the Cooper-Hewitt, the Rijksmuseum, and most recently, the Tate. By sharing collection data, museums serve as an important resource and encourage artists, researchers, and the public to create their own meaning out of the data. Some amazing data visualizations have resulted: Seattle-based astronomer Jim Davenport graphed works in the Tate collection by height and width, finding that the dimensions of the majority of objects approximated the Golden Ratio. The Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands recently invited Dutch designer Joost Grootens to create infographics based on the museum’s collection data. Installed in the collection galleries, these visualizations—probing questions like “Which works have traveled the most and to where?”—provide visitors new and exciting ways to consider the collection.

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

We’re interested in discussing how scholars and museums can work together to build tools that benefit both parties. What projects have museums undertaken to make their collections useful for researchers? What new insights are coming from these collaborations? What makes such a collaboration effective?

The Getty Foundation is funding three separate institutes. All of these offer stipends covering travel and housing:

• June 16–June 27, 2014: Beautiful Data at Harvard’s metaLAB. “Participants will be exposed to the core concepts, skills and practices necessary to make imaginative use of open collections data and assets, and to develop new forms of art-historical argument and storytelling that involve visualization, interactive media, expanded definitions of curatorial description, and hybrid analog/digital approaches to exhibition design and teaching.” (Applications open now)
• July 7–18, 2014: Digital Humanities for Art Historians at George Mason University. “‘Digital Humanities for Art Historians’ will target art historians, from graduate students, to mid-career and senior scholars, from varied backgrounds, including faculty, curators, and established art librarians and archivists who are eager to move more deeply into the digital turn in the humanities.” (Applications open soon – you can sign up for notifications here)
• July 28–August 6, 2014: Beyond the Digitized Slide Library at UCLA. “Participants will learn about debates and key concepts in the digital humanities and gain hands-on experience with tools and techniques for art historical research (including metadata basics, data visualization, network graphs, and digital mapping).” (Applications open now, due March 1st. Note: open to faculty/staff only, no current graduate students)

The Kress Foundation is sponsoring one institute. Fellowships pay for tuition, room, board, and provide a travel stipend for all participants:

• August 3–15, 2014: Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History at Middlebury: “Co-directed by Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University) and Anne Kelly Knowles (Middlebury College), the Summer Institute will emphasize how digital mapping of art historical evidence can open up new veins of research in art history as a whole.” (Applications open now, due March 3, 2014)

Several people have also written in about the “Visualizing Venice” summer workshop:

• June 3–13, 2014: Visualizing Venice: the City and the Lagoon: “Participants will use the city and the lagoon as a ‘laboratory’ through which to examine questions such as change over time and dynamic process in urban and rural environments, showing how man-made spaces respond to social and economic process and transformation. The aim of the workshop is to train scholars in how new technologies can be integrated with the study of historical and material culture. The workshop will focus on a range of visualization tools that can be used in a wide variety of research areas, in particular modeling change over time in urban space and the production of maps and low-cost photogrammetry.”