Digital tools enable visitors, and art historians, to pursue a widening web of connections. In the Getty Center galleries with Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul, about 1330, Bernardo Daddi. Tempera and gold leaf on panel, 47 1/2 x 22 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 93.PB.16

We’re really excited that James Cuno has joined the THATCamp CAA 2014 conversation, kindly responding to our invitation to author a blog post here (this essay will also be published in The Getty Iris). Cuno is president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. An art historian by training, he’s been a professor and director at several other arts institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Harvard University Art Museums; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA; and Vassar College. Here he offers a kickstarter to the discussions and debates we hope will happen at THATCamp CAA 2014 in Chicago in a few short weeks.

Art museums, research centers, and libraries are central locations for the work of art history. For those of us who work in these institutions, the question of whether to embrace digital technology has long been answered, with a resounding yes. The Getty and our sister institutions around the world are digitizing collections, making content open, publishing online, using linked open data, engaging digitally with audiences, and using technology to help advance conservation and conservation studies, among many other initiatives.

As a single example, last March 7,000 volumes in the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute had been digitized. Today it’s 13,159. The challenge we face now is to recognize the new possibilities ushered in by this critical mass of digitization, and to effectively meet them as institutions and individuals.

In museums, we’ve already seen first-hand how new digital technology, protocols, and platforms can enhance visitors’ experience. At their most basic, digital tools provide an efficient conduit for information—on individual works of art and artists, exhibition themes, and public programming. But digital also gives visitors new agency in their engagement with art. High-resolution images allow the discovery of the tiniest detail. Technical images capture objects under infrared light and X-ray. 3-D objects can be digitally manipulated, and artworks from far-flung collections can be compared side by side.

It’s true that in museums we’ve often heard the concern that digital tools will distract visitors and students from genuine encounters with works of art. I believe the opposite is more often true: that digital tools enable people to direct their own learning, formulate new questions, and find unexpected connections, the raw material of intellectual discovery.

Say a visitor is at the Getty Museum looking at Bernado Daddi’s Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul and is intrigued by the punch work around the Virgin’s head. On her phone or tablet she searches for other Daddi paintings and finds one in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence with very similar punch work. This leads her to search for more information on the Duomo, then 14^th-century  Florence, then other places in the world where Daddi paintings hang. Even if this visitor never returns to her incipient Daddi studies, she has built a mental portrait that stays with her, and may be reactivated years later when she finds herself in Edinburgh looking at Daddi’s Tryptych with the Crucifixion…and there’s that punch again. Digital enables a web of connections that are the raw material of intellectual discovery for a casual visitor, a student, or an art historian.

Punch work (designs punched into gold) was used in late-medieval
Italian painting to adorn haloes. Left: Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul (detail), about 1330, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Center: St Catherine of Alexandria with Donor and Christ Blessing (detail),
about 1340, Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze.
Right: The Coronation of the Virgin (detail), about 1340-45, the National Gallery, London

We are at a turning point in digital art history. Now that so much primary material has been digitized by collecting institutions around the world—artworks, archives, and texts of scholarship—forward-looking art historians are teaming with technologists to forge tools with this digitized material, tools that go beyond access or documentation to create new ways of working and publishing.

This is a goal of the Getty’s Digital Mellini project, a tool to study and interpret a 17^th-century manuscript collaboratively online. (Make sure to catch the lightning talk on this and its umbrella project, the Getty Scholars’ Workspace™, on Tuesday at 3:45pm by Francesca Albrezzi and Tom Scutt of the Getty Research Institute [GRI]). Under the guidance of Murtha Baca, head of digital art history at the GRI, Digital Mellini will soon culminate in a born-digital scholarly publication including a flippable, zoomable facsimile of the heretofore unpublished manuscript, one that could never exist as a physical book. It has no beginning, middle, or end. It upends established models of authorship. Most of all, the publication is both a work of scholarship and a work for scholarship.

Murtha’s team recently invited a group of art historians to user-test a prototype of this forthcoming publication. Again and again, they heard that tools like the Scholars’ Workspace can prove critical for planning and structuring inquiry, making work with primary materials more productive. “It helps me be a more efficient researcher to see the manuscript first online,” said one participant. “I don’t waste a lot of time in special collections.”

We also heard about the immense value of teaching with digital tools such as the Scholars’ Workspace, which enable scholars to enhance the digital surrogate with deep context and connections. “Most undergrads don’t have access to historical documents,” said a scholar. “This is a great way to give them primary resources to work with and yet [keep them from being] totally lost.” In fact, the tool proved so useful, some scholars almost felt guilty. “It does the work for you,” one exclaimed. “It almost feels like cheating!”

As digitization reaches critical mass and we can do more as digital art historians, what should we do? I look forward to hearing what the participants at THATCamp think is digital art history’s next, most pressing more.

Thanks to my colleagues Anne Helmreich, Murtha Baca, and Susan Edwards for input into this essay.

Our press release is live…… See the schedule here and get proposing here!

“Histories of art and visual arts practices are now–and will be in their future iterations–inextricably interwoven with the digital.  What does this mean for our scholarship, innovation, research, knowledge production, and teaching?  Join the conversation, discussion, and exchange of ideas on the digital + art + histories at THATCamp (The Technology and Humanities Camp) at CAA 2014.

Because THATCamp is an unconference, the agenda will be decided through discussion in the conference participant community.  Attendees brainstorm online before the conference dates through blog posts, and propose sessions in advance.  The agenda will be set collaboratively in the first hour of the event on Monday, February 10.  In this way, all THATCamp CAA 2014 attendees are active participants in setting the program, and proposing, leading, and documenting sessions.  We strongly encourage involvement in the process via the Proposals page on the THATCamp CAA 2014 website.

We are pleased to announce that, in addition to the agenda decided on the day, there are a number of invited presenters who will engage the THATCamp CAA 2014 community in participatory and reflective discussions and workshops.

Piotr Adamczyk, Program Manager, Google Cultural Institute (will participate via Google Hangout) // “What’s Google up to? … and is there a catch? The Open Gallery Project”

JiaJia Fei, Digital Marketing Manager, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY // “The Museum & Social Media”

Amanda French, National THATCamp Coordinator, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, VA // Omeka Workshop

Charlotte Frost, Visiting Assistant Professor of contemporary/digital art histories and digital literacies at City University of Hong Kong // Digital Publishing workshop

Dene Griger, Creative Media and Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver // “Participatory apps and founding a digital publishing house to publish digital artist’s books”

Kevin Hamilton, Associate Professor, New Media Program, School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois and students Jessica Landau and Melissa Seifert // “Learning to See Systems: addressing the role of vision in new technologies”

Liz McDermott, Managing Editor, Getty Research Institute Web and Communications // “Bridging the Gap: Presenting Scholarly Content on Social Media Platforms”

Renee McGarry, Senior instructional designer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York // “Beyond Tools and Tips: Manifestos about Teaching Digitally”

Michelle Moravec, Associate Professor, Rosemont College // “Visualizing Schneemann explores the production of histories of art using multiple digital tools”

Nancy Ross, Assistant Professor of Art History at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah // “Students Respond to Teaching Twentieth Century Art History with Gender and Data Visualizations”

ArtAndFeminism Wikipedia Meetup/Chicago // Wiki Workshop & live edit-a-thon led by Jacqueline Mabey (The office of failed projects, New York) Siân Evans (Coordinator of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLiS/NA)’s Women and Art Special Interest Group), Melanie Emerson, (Head of Reader Services at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago), Holly Stec Dankert (Head of Research and Access Services at the John M. Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Prof. Michael Mandiberg (Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center) and Amy Ballmer, (Art Librarian, The CUNY Graduate Center Mina Rees Library).

THATCamp CAA 2014 is pleased to announce the support of emerging voices in the field of digital art history.  This year, THATCamp CAA 2014 has committed to providing a platform for early-career scholars and students in the field of digital art history.  The participants below will join the roster of confirmed THATCamp speakers, and will lead discussions around key themes, ideas, and practical applications in the broad field of digital art history.

Francesca Albrezzi, University of California, Los Angeles and Tom Scutt, Getty Research Institute) // “Getty Scholars’ Workspace: Developing tools, methods, and standards for conducting and publishing original research in digital form”

Desi Gonzalez and Liam Andrew, MIT // “HyperStudio: Collaborating with Colleague and Cultural Institutions”

Meredith A. Brown, Metropolitan Museum of Art and A.L. McMichael, The Graduate Center, CUNY // “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing”

Nathalie Hager, University of British Columbia // “Case Study on WHAM – World History of Art Mashup”

Tara Zepel, University of California, San Diego // “Visualization in digital art history”

The participants listed above have been identified as THATCamp CAA 2014 Kress Fellows with costs related to their attendance defrayed by generous support from the Kress Foundation.  Their presence at THATCamp CAA 2014 will encourage dialogue around the mutually beneficial and fruitful connections between “old” and “new” art histories, “traditional” and “avant garde” digital tools, and working practices between students, emerging scholars and professionals, and senior scholars and professionals in the visual arts disciplines.  Head over to the THATCamp CAA 2014 blog to find out more about their upcoming presentation topics and research interests.

Logistics

Following the successful realization of the inaugural THATCamp CAA at the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in New York in February 2013, the second THATCamp CAA 2014 will take place Monday, February 10 (11.45am – 5.15pm) and Tuesday, February 11 (9.30am – 5pm), 2014 at Columbia College Chicago (the days immediately preceding the CAA 2014 annual conference). There will be a follow up “reflection” session on Thursday, February 13 (9.30am – noon) at the Chicago Hilton, the CAA conference hotel in the Marquette room (3rd floor).

All THATCamps are free to register for and free to attend, but space is limited and filling up fast. Further information can be found on the THATCamp CAA 2014 website: caa2014.thatcamp.org.

THATCamp CAA 2014 is organized by Anne Swartz and Michelle Millar Fisher.  The advisory board includes Suzanne Preston Blier, Pamela M. Fletcher, Hussein Keshani, Elizabeth Neely, and Christine L. Sundt.

For further information, please contact THATCamp CAA Project Manager Michelle Millar Fisher: michellemillarfisher [at] gmail [dot] com.”

You can read Diane M. Zorich’s recent study on the status of art history and digital scholarship and teaching (“Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship”) here and engage via Twitter here: @dzorich. We at THATCamp 2014 were big fans of what Diane had to say at THATCamp 2013 last year, and so we’re really excited that she agreed to write the following post for us. It’s perfect timing, as the full list of speakers for THATCamp 2014 went up today (find it here) and we’re kicking off the one-month count down to the big event with the opening of the proposals page – get involved! If you’re registered to come to THATCamp, then it’s your duty to – you’re expected to propose a session.

Those who are coming – here’s Diane’s advice for getting the most out of your THATCamp experience:

THATcamp is a rare opportunity to explore the interplay between the digital world and your research interests.  It’s a break in the grind, a gift of unscheduled exploration. It’s also a chance to explore without the discomfort you may feel from colleagues who are less-than-supportive about digital scholarship. Attendees at THATcamp do not need to be swayed.  They start from a baseline belief that the digital realm offers opportunities to enrich their research, teaching, writing and publishing.  These are your people.

With 2014 upon us, and CAA’s THATCamp just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about ways to maximize the opportunity offered by THATCamp. I have several THATCamps under my belt (including last year’s CAA event) and now have a feel for the flexibility and flow of these events. For what it’s worth, here are my suggestions to first-timers and veterans alike.

1. Plan ahead

I know that seems antithetical to THATCamp, whose “unconference” format eschews the conventions of traditional conference planning.  But if you don’t spend some time thinking about what you want to explore at this event, you’ll wind up tagging along on the interests of others.  My worst THATcamp experience occurred when I attended as a “blank canvas,” hoping to be guided by the session ideas of other attendees.  Being a bystander at THATCamp is like being in a tour group:  you see the sites, but you miss the experiences.

Everyone has their own ways of planning for these events.  I usually ask two questions:  “What do I need or want to know?” and “What digital scholarship have I come across in the past year that I found inspirational (and why?)”.   The answers to these questions usually provide me with plenty of idea fodder.

2. Experiment

When you are trained to think carefully, to do a slow reading of works, and to observe intently, it is hard to pivot toward the fast-paced, uncertain, and prone-to-failure world of experimentation. But experimentation is helpful for revealing useful research pursuits, identifying where to expend resources, and, perhaps most importantly, expanding one’s breadth of experience. My best THATcamp experiences occurred when I tried something new and completely outside my skill set and work routine.

So when I plan for a THATCamp, I also think about things I would like tinker with that (a) I don’t have time for during the routine of my work life and (b) I don’t have enough experience with to know where to start.  With these parameters in mind, here’s my latest wish list:

• Visualization.  I’d love to take part in a session that allows participants to experiment with various visualizations of their data (using current online visualization tools and little to no programming).  Participants could bring their own datasets to play with, or datasets from open access databases could be provided for those who did not have a research dataset.  By the end of the session, participants will have experimented with different types of visualizations on their dataset, used different visualization tools, and maybe, if lucky, have even discerned new patterns or insights from their visualizations that they can explore further.

• Data wrangling/scrubbing tools.  I’m interested in a tutorial that uses out-of-the-box (and free) tools that help clean, manipulate, gather, extract and otherwise prepare data (e.g. Google Open Refine, Wget, using your operating system command line, etc.) Again, participants could bring their own datasets to play with, or use datasets from open access databases.

3. Build something

One of the highlights of last year’s CAA THATCamp was the creation of an adhoc online art history textbook.  Pulled together in one day by a group of art historians, it proved to be a very successful “proof of concept”, demonstrating the ease of developing such a resource (even for individuals with very limited digital skills) and the value of this type of resource for teaching and course development.  It was a modest effort that showed great potential.

What tool or resource might make your research, teaching, or writing life more fruitful? If you can, crystallize your idea into a small and manageable use case, tool, or other application that you can develop over the course of a day.  If you have a hard time coming up with an appropriate “small build”, just propose your idea as a session and work with those who join in to turn your idea into something concrete.

In this spirit of “building,” my current wish for a CAA or related THATCamp is a session or workshop on “coding for art historians” that introduces coding within the context of an art historical context, application, tool, or function, etc. [In other words, don’t teach me how to code “Hello World!”[1]  Teach me how to code something that is relevant to my use of art historical images and data.]

These “plan/experiment/build” suggestions offer a hands-on approach to complement the guest speakers and theoretical discussions that often make up part of THATCamp agendas.  Learning from the wisdom of others, as well as working directly on something with others, makes for potent formula.  Indeed, several attendees at last year’s CAA THATCamp reported that the event was one of the most energizing experiences of their professional lives.

If you are a THATCamp veteran, what advice do you have to offer for optimizing the experience?  Please add your suggestions in the comments section below.

Starting with an analyst position at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Data Lead for the Google Art Project, and now on the Content Team of the Google Cultural Institute, Piotr Adamczyk’s work is focused on the use of open/linked data in cultural heritage institutions. Piotr has a background a little different than many who will attend CAA’s THATCamp –  undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and graduate degrees in Human Factors and Library and Information Science. He’s authored papers, organized workshops, and served as a Program Committee member for the Association for Computing Machinery and cultural heritage conferences, and his arts research includes residencies at the Banff New Media Institute, Medialab-Prado, and Eyebeam.

He’ll join us at THATCamp to discuss: “What’s Google up to? A quick overview of all of the Google Culture Institute initiatives available to artists, galleries, libraries, archives, museums – large and small. What technology, support, storage, hardware, and tools are available … and is there a catch?” Take a sneak peek at Google’s new Open Gallery project here.

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

   Providing a platform for digitized collections. The Google Cultural Institute partners with non-profit institutions (380+) to host copyright-free or copyright-cleared content at no cost with no transfer of rights and provides the same publishing tools for use by anyone on their own websites. For non-profit institutions, we also provide Street View of their public galleries along with a very high resolution photograph of one object from their collection.

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

   Publication. Everyone involved is grappling with the (perfect) process and the longer we take to create an environment (good-enough) where compelling scholarship can be produced, distributed, and found by academic and broader audiences, the longer we’re stuck arguing about relevance and identity rather than making new work.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

   Among institutions, most innovative work seems to be coming from the midsize. Too small and they’re worried about staying afloat. Too large and they too often tackle technical problems for which they have great ideas but develop solutions that can’t be replicated by others. The midsize, those with just enough staff or resources (even in one department – education, tech, publications) to think beyond their day-to-day tasks, are finding compelling solutions to the problems faced by all.

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

   Preparing materials for departments, colleges, and universities to help them understand digital art history scholarship — all in the service of improving scholarly recognition and tenure cases for faculty willing to experiment.

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.

Find the recordings of sessions from the recent conference, “American Art History and Digital Scholarship,” here. With sessions on mapping images, networks and contexts, curating online, and publishing online, it’s important viewing for THATCamp attendees!

Nina Simon designs and researches participatory museum experiences. She’s the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and author of The Participatory Museum. Her blog, Museum 2.0, explores ways that web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design. A recent post on her blog caught our eye. Where are the most interesting confluences of big data + museums/collections + art happening? 

Detail on distribution of artworks in the Tate collection by birthdate of artists, visualized by Florian Krautli. What does “big data” look like for museums? Collecting institutions have enormous stacks of data about the artifacts and artworks in their stores. Several museums around the world have worked hard to make their data accessible by providing free access to datasets, applying Creative Commons licenses to digital content, or creating APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow programmers to build their own software on the museum’s data. Last month, the Tate joined the party when they opened up their collection database to the world on GitHub, a website where programmers collaborate on projects. The Tate is providing metadata about artworks and artists in its collection–over 70,000 artworks in all. The data is in a computer language called .JSON that is commonly used for data sharing and processing. Even if you don’t speak database, it’s worth seeing how the Tate is presenting their collection to programmers on GitHub. What can you do with these .JSON files? Anyone can pull down the data and use it for their own purposes, subject to some simple goodwill guidelines. Here are two examples of visualizations created by GitHub users: Florian Krautli, a Swiss designer living in London, graphed the volume of artworks by individual artists in the Tate’s collection over time. Jim Davenport, an astronomer living in Seattle, charted the height and width of all of the works in the Tate’s collection. These visualizations are fun. They are beautiful. They raise interesting questions about the Tate’s collection and the imperfections of collections data. But the discussions they raise are limited. Florian’s blog post centers on the question of why there are so many pieces by William Turner in the Tate’s collection. A commenter pointed out that there must be an error in the data, as it is highly unlikely that Turner produced more than 40,000 works in his lifetime. Jim’s post suggests some fun but somewhat silly conclusions about the height/width ratio of artworks.Reading these posts and the related conversations, I was struck by two conflicting feelings: It’s awesome that data-sharing is causing people to have a conversation about what artists are represented in a museum collection, what kind of artwork the Tate has, what surprising things can be visualized and learned from the collections data, and how the data can be improved. The data is sufficiently flawed and idiosyncratic to yield conclusions of questionable value. Knowing the dimensions of the frame a painting is in is much less compelling than many, many other things that could be known and explored about works of art. I’m imagining visualizations focusing on the gender or race of artists in the collection, frequency of loans (and to whom), frequency of display, common words used in label text… the list goes on. To me, the fact that #1 is exciting and promising makes addressing #2 worth it. Opening up data is just the first (big) step to make it usable and useful. These experiments prompt questions, identify gaps in the data, and promote new forms of collection, dissemination, and analysis. The data you have is not always the data you want, but you often don’t know that until you start monkeying with it. Future iterations of data sharing and use will help institutions and citizen-participants take the next steps to make it meaningful. This post originally appeared on the Museum 2.0 site on 27 Nov 2013. Thanks to Nina Simon for allowing the cross-post here.

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!

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.