Category: Uncategorized

            Oral histories and videos are sources that can be especially useful for art history. Oral histories are an important source for collecting stories from people who have first-hand experience, and videos may be the medium of an artwork or a method of its documentation. Oral histories are great primary sources that often capture different information from written sources. It seems that oral histories require the researcher to consider more thoughtfully who the interviewee is, who the interviewer is, and what questions are being asked compared to written and spatial or map sources. This week, we reviewed how to practically refine oral transcripts and annotate videos to make these sources more accessible for research.

Matthew J. Westerby proposes in “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” that scholars should create their own metadata from publicly available images and sources. Westerby explains that IIIF annotations, the International Image Interoperability Framework, are useful for standardizing formats of images and videos for accessible sharing, but they may not suit the needs of the scholar using them. To solve this problem, he suggests “annotating upstream,” or, in other words, the scholar adds his or her own annotations in addition to the data received by the institution providing the image. This “knowledge-de-centralization” mitigates institutional bias and allows for individual scholars to personalize the media to their own needs. Making these annotations publicly available can create media with what Westerby defines as “thick data,” or digital images with a lot of description added by multiple people on top of the IIIF provided by the institution. Rather than accepting the “downstream” annotations, the scholar can enhance the context surrounding an image.

In the workshop session of class, we practiced annotating videos. The annotations for images that Westerby describes in his article can also extend to videos. In class, we used a clip from The Cotton Club, the 1984 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, to practice writing annotations.¹ These annotations focused exclusively on the set design and cinematography of the scene. Another scholar may be interested in a different aspect of the film, like the music or dialog. Annotations created by different people for different purposes would create the “thick data” that Westerby describes. Public annotations on digital content create a new area for scholarship generation and analysis.

I also experimented with annotating video—albeit on a much simpler scale. I refined a short clip from the 1964 stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, produced by Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment with the online platform Panopto.² Panopto allows the user to correct the dialog transcript for captions, post interactive discussion posts, and notes. The discussion posts and notes are timed with specific moments in the video, making these features especially helpful for internal research note-taking or film class discussion questions. I included notes that explained the commercial origins of the story, song, and movie of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer alongside individual frames in this short clip. While I added notes contextualizing the origin and creation of the Rudolph story, in an attempt to reveal the ultimately commercial basis of this classic Christmas tale, another scholar may be interested in the technical processes of stop motion animation. In this way, we would each create different annotations for the same digital object, creating “thick data.”

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rankin/Bass Entertainment Animation (1964)

By pressing the right upwards arrow button, the user can navigate to Panopto, where he or she can view my video annotations.

 Although I do not have videos or oral histories pertaining to my research right now, Panopto will be useful in the future if I need auto generated and editable captions as well as timed video annotations. Interfaces like Panopto are accessible, practically helpful, and fairly intuitive for the scholar to use for producing and refining oral history transcripts and videos. Panopto’s editable captions and notes are especially helpful for the internal research process rather than a public-facing final “project.”

The Institute of Museum and Library Services provides a thorough guide to beginning an oral history project. Linda Shopes’ article “Making Sense of Oral History,” a part of the Institute’s “Oral History in the Digital Age” site, delineates features of oral histories that should be considered by the scholar who is using or creating them. Some of these nuances include recognizing who is being interviewed, who the interviewer is, and what questions are being asked. She also reminds the reader that oral histories are based on people’s own subjective experiences and recollections, so they should not be accepted as fact. She uses several examples throughout this article to illustrate her points. For example, she provides different perspectives on the same experience within one family, and the reader can identify how each interviewee’s answers are formed based on their role within the family (e.g. father, mother, and daughter). She also uses the example of a former enslaved woman interviewed by a young. Black man in comparison to a white, female social worker. In this interview, the reader can see how the interviewee is much more candid with the Black interviewer in comparison to the subdued, practiced answers for the white woman. These considerations outlined by Shopes led me to think about how I should use oral histories in my future research, knowing that they are important but also subjective, living documents.

I think that creating, refining, and using oral histories for research is a promising direction for a more “digital” art history. If oral records exist documenting artists and their art, they will be a relevant and useful primary source to incorporate into research. Annotating images and videos also generate greater scholarship and context for non-experts of the image. This allows scholars to build up institutionally designated IIIF to provide more context or scholarly perspectives on a single image or video. Resources like Panopto can facilitate this scholarly annotating process. Although transcripts or annotations may primarily be used by scholars for their individual, internal research projects, making this additional data available and usable to the public is another method of scholarship-sharing. Whether a scholar’s annotations result in a polished, public-facing digital project or not, the creation of thickly descriptive, publicly accessible metadata still supports future scholarship and creative curiosities.

¹The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Orion Pictures, 1984). ²Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, directed by Larry Roemer, produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, aired December 6, 1964 on NBC.

Spatial mapping is an old but still useful and relevant tool in art history. This week, after reading about and looking through different art historical mapping projects, we had the chance to experiment with some accessible digital mapping tools ourselves, including Google Maps and JS Story Maps. With advances in technology, digital mapping is an accessible and educationally rewarding tool in the field of art history.

            In Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel’s article “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” she explains that art historians’ interest in the spatial relations of art is not new—in fact, it dates back to the time of Giorgio Vasari.[1] The identification of art with particular places helped to define the cultural identity of countries while also advancing nationalist agendas.[2] In recent decades, spatial mapping has become an analytical tool facilitated by advancing digital technology. Joyeux-Prunel offers a tactical introduction on beginning, organizing, and executing digital mapping projects. Ultimately, Joyeux-Prunel explains that mapping in art history is useful for education and scholarly research.

Earlier in the semester, we read “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods” by Paul Jaskot, who argued that digital tools for macroanalysis would become the norm for art history research in twenty-first century.[3] In this article, he used the example of a digital mapping project of a German design firm that allowed him to extract an unusual pattern in the firm’s construction habits. He used this example to illustrate his point that macroanalysis with the aid of digital tools can highlight patterns that a human may not be able to recognize by just reading.

The Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles article from this week, “Architecture and Maps, Databases and Archives: An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” highlight how a mapping project may help advance scholarly research.[4] Rather than the end goal being an interactive, educational digital humanities project for the public, this project served to help Jaskot and Knowles understand the construction and building habits of the Nazis running Auschwitz for a written research paper. By mapping and tracking the construction of the buildings, Jaskot and Knowles revealed a pattern of architectural instability and dynamism rather than the stable, unchanging, presence that the Nazis wanted to communicate.

While Jaskot and Knowles’ digital mapping project was not permanently available to the public, other digital mapping projects like Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France, Boyeux-Prunel’s Artl@s Geomap of Paris salons, and the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones. My personal favorite is Columbia University’s Mapping Gothic France because of its immense scope, images, and user features. Mapping Gothic France pinpoints where a multitude of Gothic cathedrals are located throughout Europe, not limited to just France. When a use selects a single cathedral, they are offered an interactive floorplan in which arrows provide images of the church from different viewpoints. The panorama is also very detailed and helpful for both the casual browser and the interested scholar. The depth of Mapping Gothic France can be attributed to the years dedicated to this project and advanced funding through a grant.

Although more limited in scope compared to Mapping Gothic France, the University of Iowa’s Campus Cornerstones offers an interactive, archival-based account of the buildings on campus throughout university history. Combining both map and timeline features, Campus Cornerstones allows users to see where old buildings used to be located and what stands in their place now. From this project, users can understand the architectural history of the University of Iowa and how it evolved over time.

I tried my own hand at basic digital mapping in throughout this week, as well. I came into class this week with some experience in both Google Maps custom maps and JS Story Maps. In Google Maps, I had identified where monumental sculptures were located in a 1974 public sculpture exhibition, Monumenta, throughout the city of Newport in Rhode Island. I had used JS Story Maps for an Italian project during my undergraduate degree to map out a theoretical road trip across Italy. In class this week, I began playing with a few maps, like a Google Map identifying places that I visited often when I studied abroad in Rome and a JS Story Map identifying a few centers of Pennsylvania German folk art. Through this experimentation, I appreciated how the intuitiveness of these interfaces. These low-stakes tests also prepared me for a project more related to a different research project that I am working on.

I decided to make a map of twenty objects in Google Maps that Owen Jones identifies in his 1856 book The Grammar of Ornament. This map does not include all the illustrations in the book, but I attempted to choose one illustration that had the clearest location from each chapter. I excluded any illustrations from his chapter on designs from nature and instead opted to select two illustrations of column capitals from the Egypt chapter. I realized soon after I began inputting the location information in the map that some location’s names had not remained the same. For example, the “Memnonium” that Jones refers to in Egypt, is now referred to as the “Ramesseum” to refer to an ancient tomb. There were also a few items from India and Persia that Jones accessed from libraries and museums in England rather than their place of origin. He also uses racist and culturally reductive language, using the term “savage” to refer to indigenous tribes across continents. Because he used this term to name a chapter, I included it in the description for that illustration, but I made a note in the map description warning any potential viewers about the presence of this racist, antiquated language.

After reading the articles about metadata last week and my own experimentation with mapping this week, I realize that there is also a healthy amount of ambiguity that scholars must contend with. I think that approaching uncertainty with transparency about unknown or ambiguous information is the best way to present information without construing data. Mapping is still a useful and relevant tool in art history to extract patterns from large amounts of data and allow users to understand a bigger picture of the relationship of art with place and time.

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[1] Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities for a Spatial, Global, and Social History of Art,” In The Routledge Companion, ed. Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 88-108.; Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 88.

[2] Joyeux-Prunel, “Digital Humanities,” 89.

[3] Paul B. Jaskot, “The Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019): 21-33.

[4] Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles, “Architecture and Maps, Databases, and Archives; An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany,” The Iris (February 15, 2017).

            The word “data” seems like it strikes fear in the hearts of all scholars in the humanities, especially in a field like art history. While it would be easy to say that the future of art history is inevitably digital, I think that also discounts the work that good data analysis pioneered by art historians can do for the field. Earlier in the semester, we learned how data analysis can inspire creative digital humanities projects and digital collections. These efforts ultimately make art, history, and knowledge more accessible to those around the world. Shouldn’t that be the goal of any good scholarship?

            I had this in mind as I read our assigned articles this past week discussing exactly how to extract this good, clean data that could make knowledge an scholarship more accessible. It turns out, the answer is not quite as clear! Scholars disagree on exactly how to organize data and institutions abide by a certain standard of sharing their data. We saw these opposing views of data organization confronting each other in Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Constantine Petridis’s article, “Mapping Senufo: Making Visible Debatable Information and Situated Knowledge,” and Karl W. Broman and Kara H. Woo’s, “Data Organization in Spreadsheets.”[1]

            The main difference between Gagliardi and Petridis’s article and Broman and Woo’s is how they treat ambiguity. Ambiguity and uncertainty is unavoidable in art history and surfaces often with ancient art or non-western art, like the Mapping Senufo project which involved organizing West African art. For Gagliardi and Petridis, they struggled to adequately assign labels to pieces of art that had an unclear artist or origin, owing to the fact that there may be multiple spellings or names for the artist or locations. Broman and Woo suggest that every cell in a spreadsheet should be filled, even if the information is unknown, and to have a standardized spelling or phrase to describe the same piece of data. This is helpful to eliminate inconsistences across spreadsheets, but it may not be truly reflective of the actual data.

In the case of the Mapping Senufo project, assigning a standardized name to an artist or location eliminates the ambiguity and reduces its cultural complexity. This elimination of ambiguity asserts that only one name is correct and any other spellings are wrong, imposing this binary worldview and a misleading authority of certainty. If a date or exact artist’s name is unknown, it would be dishonest to represent an approximation or educated guess as authoritatively true.

Including this ambiguity of the unknown is not conducive to using the data for further analysis, though. In class, we saw how one museum, the Tate in London, combatted this in their publicly available API. The Tate includes a qualitative column next to their quantitative information to explain how and when they simplify their data to format it best for analysis. For example, if a painting was created circa 1840 to 1850, they would include that information in the qualitative column, while a more concrete date, “1840,” is added in the quantitative column. In this way, the museum can be transparent about the information they have while also providing the best approximated information for data analysis.

The key takeaway that I gleaned from this topic of data and data analysis from a humanities perspective is that ambiguity is ok—and necessary—in a field like art history. In an environment where data analysis seems to be an exciting new path towards future art historical scholarship, it may be necessary to artificially “clean” ambiguous data for analysis. As long as the data originator is transparent about ambiguity and uncertainty in their data, I think that it can be responsibly simplified for helpful data analysis.

Text Analysis

            Text analysis is another method that can be helpful for humanities research, including art history. In class this week, we reviewed the Google N-Gram Viewer and the Voyant text analysis software. Even simple functions like counting word frequency or word placement can be helpful for pinpointing main ideas, subjects, or terminology that occur frequently across a corpus of documents.

             For understanding broad trends across all published works, I think that the Google N-Gram word frequency tracker is especially useful. Like most digital tools used in humanities research, this tool identifies patterns, but it cannot provide an explanation for that discovered pattern. For example, in class we discussed how certain words may simply appear less in the 19th century simply because there were less publications compared to the most recent decade. This tool may be helpful for tracking the popularity of certain ideas or concepts, but it is still just a starting point for deeper analysis.

            Voyant seems especially useful for scholars who have several text documents to sift through. Using an example article from a library science course, I found phrases and terms that recurred often throughout the text. It was helpful to see phrases that occurred the most often and where they appeared throughout the text.

            For a research paper, I am examining the book plates in Owen Jones’s 1856 book, The Grammar of Ornament. I think that text analysis with Voyant will be appropriate to use for this project. Before using the Voyant application, I would need to ensure that the PDF of Jones’s digitized work has been properly OCR’d so that it recognizes the text. Then, I can use Voyant to see what words and phrases that Jones uses frequently. This can give me a better idea, not only of Jones’s work, but also of the language that his contemporaries may have used in related texts.

            To further explore Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament, I am considering creating a more comprehensive searchable collection of the book plates in the text. I began this project by uploading ten book plates into CollectionBuilder’s GitHub. To continue this project, I would need to add to the metadata organized in a Google Sheet, including the standard “tombstone” data along with the file identifier. This data can then be converted into a CSV file to be uploaded into CollectionBuilder. This project would not be possible without accessible, data analysis tools.

            Incorporating digital tools into the field of art history does not reduce the role of the scholar. In fact, they can aid in analysis and increase accessibility to this scholarship. There are also creative aways to maintain art history’s ambiguity or at least methods to maintain transparency. Through clean data and data analysis, art historians can integrate digital tools into their methodology, continuing make their scholarship more accessible and innovative.

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[1] Karl W. Broman and Kara H. Woo, “Data Organization in Spreadsheets,” The American Statistician 72, 1 (2018): 2-10.; Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Constantine Petridis, “Mapping Senufo: Making Visible Debatable Information and Situated Knowledge,” in Perspectives on Data, ed. Emily Lew Fry and Erin Canning (Art Institute of Chicago, 2022).

            Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank’s article “Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art Survey Class: Creating an Omeka Exhibition Around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall” unites the themes that we have been discussing as a class since the beginning of the semester.[1] Within her experimental integration of digital art history into a Pre-Columbian art survey class, Kilroy-Ewbank notes the challenges, successes, and potential for using a digitally centered project as a part of her pedagogical methodology. We can see the product of educating students in building digital repositories through interfaces like The William Blake Archive. Introducing digital tools to practice digital art history earlier in art history students’ educations will facilitate new and innovative projects.

            The objective of Kilroy-Ewbank’s project for her students was to create an interactive digital exhibition investigating various characteristics of the Pre-Columbian Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Kilroy-Ewbank explained that students often had trouble understanding the pictorial nature of written Mixtec communication. She saw the creation of this interactive exhibition as a method for students to meaningfully interact with the piece in order to achieve greater comprehension of the work as well as Mixtec art and communication more broadly. By dividing students into teams to learn how to create their exhibit from a new digital tool, Omeka, she made collaboration necessary to the classroom rather than the more traditional research paper completed individually.

            Alison Langmeade also wrote about how digital art history encourages collaboration in her example of the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop (VMW).[2] Through this organization of students, Langmeade explained how the VMW allowed students to collaborate on projects together rather than conduct research in isolation. Kilroy-Ewbank’s Omeka project for her students functions in the same way. She notes that even outside the project, she encouraged collaborative research and study made possible by Google Apps suitable for sharing notes with whole classes. She also acknowledges, like Langmead and Paul Jaskot, that digital analysis is useful for macroanalysis and for finding spatial and temporal patterns in works but that it is the human’s responsibility to explain the pattern.[3] The pictorial nature of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall also lends itself to be analyzed and explained well through a digital project.

            Without knowing a lot about the Codex Zouche-Nuttall itself, its overwhelming amount of images remind me of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Last week, I also mentioned Bosch’s work and the Netherlands’ subsequent digital humanity project that creates an audio-visual experience where the user can zoom in and click on details for further information.[4] I can imagine students creating a similar digital project for the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Kilroy-Ewbank notes how students were responsible for collecting comparative images and the potential to integrate geographical or topographical data into their exhibitions. The practice of creating, arranging, and constructing a digital exhibition not only allowed students to create a unique research project to learn more about a piece of Mesoamerican history, but it also introduced undergraduate students to digital tools to disseminate scholarship in an age inundated with digital images.

            One challenge that Kilroy-Ewbanks noted was students’ frustrations with using Omeka, a completely new tool for them, and the ensuing awkwardness or inconsistencies that manifested in the resulting exhibition. I am experiencing similar frustration technological frustration while using the digital repository-building tool, Collection Builder through GitHub. During my undergraduate studies, I had taken classes that did involve aspects of digital humanities and digital art history, but I mostly participated in the research and scholarship rather than the digital construction.

While studying abroad in Rome, Italy, I worked with fellow students in a Museum Studies class to create a digital exhibition of fake art confiscated by the Carabinieri de Tutelo di Patrimonio (the site is still active if you would like to check it out! Deception by Design: Lessons from Forgeries). A graduate student constructed the digital exhibition, while the undergraduate students researched and wrote about the objects. In her class, Kilroy-Ewbanks required the students to also be involved in the maintenance of metadata and construction of the digital exhibition.

            The creation of digital exhibitions and repositories like The William Blake Archive are helpful for sharing scholarship with a greater public and for creating new scholarship. Kilroy-Ewbanks notes in the conclusion of her article that some of her goals for the Codex Zouche-Nuttall project included having her students learn the importance of sharing scholarship and the fact that history is created through thoughtful research and synthesis. The William Blake Archive is an early example of a digital project aimed at increasing access and generating scholarship related to the art and writing of William Blake. Starting in 1995, The William Blake Archive unites the works of Blake across several repositories and features rotating digital exhibits that highlight different aspects of Blake’s lifetime as an artist, like an exhibition dedicated to his work in Sussex for William Hayley or his drawings of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The William Blake Archive is a great example of the past of digital projects, but it also inspires the future for even better digital repositories.

            The William Blake Archive is not without its faults. Likely because of its long life, issues of maintenance and uniformity inevitably become issues as contributors and editors come and go. I think that as more scholars experiment with creating digital tools, upkeep and maintenance will prove to be an important factor to consider as the life of the project persists.  

            Integrating digital art history methods into undergraduate art history curriculum, like Kilroy-Ewbanks’ assigned project, allows art history to adapt to the digital world. As scholarship is almost entirely shared and produced online, it is important for students of art history to learn about helpful digital tools for their own research interests—technological frustration and all.

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[1] Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, “Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art Survey Class: Creating an Omeka Exhibition around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018).

[2] Alison Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018).

[3] Paul B. Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019), 26.

[4] Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights (Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, 2016), https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html#.

            Digital collections are one of the most helpful research resources an institution can provide. Coming from the perspective of an art historical researcher, I typically arrive at a museum or cultural institution’s site knowing what I want to see. Not every museum site visitor is conducting research, though, and it is important for institutions’ digital collection searches to accommodate both audiences. Fabian Offert and Peter Bell, Dominik Bonisch, Tim Sherratt, and Mitchell Whitelaw write about new and past digital collections and interfaces that explore the potential of digital resources to effectively organize digital collection to be more user-friendly.

            Sheratt offers examples of how people can creatively use publicly available digital records in his article, “It’s all about the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People.” Written in 2011, Sherratt demonstrates the potential to push digital collections beyond only making them available online. One of his examples is the project “The Real Face of White Australia,” which he uses to explain how digital databases have the ability to turn records from tools of oppression to a restoration of humanity. In the case of “The Real Face of White Australia,” Sherratt and Kate Bagnall used photographs that government officials in the 19^th and 20^th centuries required non-white Australians—which included Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants in addition to indigenous Australians—to submit so that they could re-enter the country if they traveled abroad. Because the National Archives of Australia digitized these records and made them public, Sheratt and Bagnall could use these photographs to create a searchable database and craft biographies for these people to offer a counter-history to the myth of a “White Australia.” This project demonstrated how digital records could be used analytically and to restore marginalized perspectives in history.

            Transitioning from Sherratt’s accounts of early forays into digital collection organization, Bonisch and Offert and Bell report on experiments with generative models to improve the intuitiveness of digital collections through pattern recognition. Bonisch explains an experiment using the massive, digitized collection of the Danish National Statens Museum for Kunst to create a model trained to “think like a curator.” Working in a bottom-up pattern, the artificial intelligence treats each separate piece as its own data point and gradually narrows it down based on similar visual features and metadata. Offert and Bell discuss the use of imgs.ai, an artificial tool also aimed at increasing the browse and searchability of several collections. Although it cannot search across collections, imgs.ai works with a few museums including the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan, and the Getty. This model begins by presenting the viewer with a random series of all the museum’s digitized images. The user can click on an individual image to see more images with similar features. In this way, the model keeps “a human in the loop” in its searches. From Sherratt’s early examples of using digital collections to create interactive, analytical databases, Bonisch, Offert, and Bell take the technology forward another step with generative technology creating and recognizing patterns between images.

            Exploring digital collections is essential for any student of art history. In my experience, the digital collections of the Metropolitan, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rijksmuseum are particularly user-friendly for researchers—especially those that have a very clear idea of what they are looking for. While conducting research for my undergraduate thesis about a wardrobe with German decorative influences, I needed to search the collections of a few Swiss and German museums. From a book detailing the Historisches Museum Basel’s collection, I found the accession number of a wardrobe that I believed would be particularly helpful to include in my work. The collection site proved to be very accurate for finding that particular wardrobe. When I used the keyword “wardrobe” to search for more examples, the results were limited. The case was even more drastic in the collection search for the Bayerisches National Museum. This digital collection could only recognize German words (Fig. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “wardrobe”

Fig. 2: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “schrank“

This small experiment between primarily German collections may only prove my own lingual Anglo-centricity, but it does introduce another challenge to organizing and improving the accessibility of digital collections. Is there a way for metadata attached to images to be easily translated? In a world where digital and online spaces can feasibly grant access to collections from any corner of the globe, will language still be a barrier? Or will tools that primarily use visual features, like imgs.ai, mitigate this problem?

            Digital collections are important for institutions not only for research but to grant accessibility to all. This not only includes academics, but also the casual browser. While collections databases should be able to execute advance search functions, institutions should also provide intuitive and engaging interfaces to browse through. Whitelaw discusses this idea in his article “Generous Interfaces for Digital Collections.” Whitelaw praises the intuitive nature of the Rijksmuseum website and offers a few examples of user-friendly interfaces in Australia including “Discover the Queenslander,” a magazine archive, and “Manly Images,” a series of digitized images in the collection of the Manly Public Library. I think that the Rijksmuseum is also a great example of an institution that balances accurate, thorough, and intuitive search functions with engaging content for the casual browser. Its “Art Explorer” tab is particularly exceptional because it provides prompts to encourage leisurely audiences to interact with its collections. In the future, I think that institutions should look to the Rijksmuseum’s website as an example for both leisurely browsing and detailed searches.

            After this week, I firmly believe that digitized collections should be accessible to academics and general audiences alike. Bonisch and Offert and Bell’s articles highlighted the potential to make digital collections even more user-friendly while Sherratt’s article the great work that digital collections management has already accomplished. Whitelaw emphasized the necessity of “generous” interfaces to de-mystify searches and encourage browsing for general interest. Moving forward, it will be exciting to see—and even participate in—the new methods that institutions will discover to make their collections even more engaging and accessible to the world.

           

I decided to digitize a photograph of my dog, Jax, this past week in Digital Art History. In this educational exercise, I practiced how to properly scan, digitally adjust colors, and write alt text for this digital reproduction of Jax’s photograph. This experience gave me insight—albeit on a micro-scale—of the digitization protocols of museums, libraries, and cultural institutions.

Digitization is a crucial step forward for museums, libraries, and cultural institutions to broaden access to their collections. In the book chapter “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Evaluating and Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource” Emma Standford explains the history, best practices, challenges, and potential of digitization for museums and cultural institutions. Digitizing collections creates the potential for broader access to art, documents, and objects.

Digitization is inherently a surrogate for the original, whether it’s a digital copy of a painting or a digitized photograph of a living, breathing golden retriever. Surrogates are not new to the field of art history. As early as 1890, Herman Grim integrated a lantern slide projector into his lectures, using projected images as surrogates for works of art and architecture.[1] Digitization and digital photography allowed the transition from physical slides to digital projected images in the art history classroom. Even more advanced technology and software development allow for interactive methods of viewing objects or architectural spaces. It is impossible to digitally re-create the experience of viewing an object in-person, but the versatility of digital surrogates also grants viewers access to different methods of interaction with an object.

Digital-storytelling is a popular way to interact with the digital surrogate of an object. It primarily serves an educational purpose. In class we viewed an example of the collaborative software of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIF), the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Compariscope that allows viewers to overlay The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn over the artist’s original sketches. This tool encourages users to study the artist’s process and transition from a first sketch to the final painting. In a previous art history course, I also played with the publicly sponsored “interactive documentary” Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights, which creates an audio-visual experience for the user. [2] It pairs music with specific scenes in Bosch’s triptych, offers explanations for details in the painting, and allows the viewer to closely examine the work. These digital resources are not analytical in nature, but, as digital-storytelling tools, they do help share scholarly research in the classroom and the museum.

            Besides its educational advantages, digitization ultimately improves and broadens access to an institution’s collections. As a student with experience working in archives and special collections libraries, I have participated in digitization projects and witnessed their utility. For example, I scanned large, old, and fragile land survey maps for the Newport Historical Society while working in the Salve Regina University Archives. This project presented a few nuances to digitization that Stanford also elaborates upon in her chapter.

First, the necessity to update and improve the image quality of the digitized maps indicated institutions’ ongoing struggle to keep up with the most current technology. Stanford noted that even since the advent of digital photography, there are clear improvements in image quality from an object digitized twenty years ago and five years ago. [3] I learned that the Newport Historical Society had also already digitized the maps, but the University recently acquired a scanner that could capture significantly more depth per square inch. The Newport Historical Society’s decision to re-scan the maps demonstrated the necessity to maintain and update digital collections as technology improves.

Another factor influencing an institution’s digitization practices is access to the proper technology. In the case of the Newport Historical Society maps, it involved reaching out and collaborating with another institution, the Salve Regina University Archives. This may be an optimal solution for smaller, local institutions, but the wealth and resources available to an institution affects the quantity, quality, and type of objects in a collection that get digitized.

Stanford argues that determining what and how objects or documents are digitized is inherently subjective.[4] Although large institutions may have the financial autonomy to run their own digitization experiments, most non-profit institutions rely on private or corporate donors or grants. This ultimately affects what museums choose to digitize because access to essential funding may be at stake.

            Hans Haacke outlines the precarious position of museums between independence and accountability to donors in the chapter “Museums: Managers of Consciousness” in the book Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum.[5] Haacke explains that museums are inevitably political institutions since they are accountable to those—either through public, government grants or private, corporate sponsorships—that control funding.[6] This makes the operational decisions of museums, like choosing what and how to digitize a collection, dependent on the source of funding for the project. In the case of corporate sponsorships, Haacke considers, museums may face even greater pressure to produce impressive, “box office” exhibitions.[7] This similar self-censorship is also true for digitization projects. Digitization projects, like exhibitions, are stuck between aiming to provide greater access to their collections while also molding projects to fit within a grant’s parameters or to appease a private donor or corporate sponsor.

            Despite digitization’s inherent subjectivity, responsiveness to new technology, and dependence on adequate funding and resources, it is clearly a significant benefit for museums, libraries, and cultural institutions that grew from the rapid technological advancement of the last twenty years. Digitization increases access to art, objects, and documents (and photographs to pets!) while also facilitating the creation of digital humanities projects. The challenges to digitization are great, but the potential for broadened access to collections for research, education, and even just general interest is worth the effort.

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[1] Alison Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018), 2.

[2] Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights (Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, 2016), https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html#.

[3] Emma Standford, “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. by Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 206.

[4] Standford, “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates,” 205.

[5] Hans Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Routledge, 2020), 400-412.

[6] Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” 407-408.

[7] Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” 409.

Historically, the field of art history is a discipline that uses the most current technology for photo and video projection. Now in the twenty-first century, the rapid innovation of analytical digital tools presents the discipline with the opportunity to integrate these tools into the field’s research methodology. Similar arguments and themes about the nature and future of art history in a digital world are articulated in articles by scholars Harald Klinke, Paul Jaskot, Alison Langmead, and Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund.¹ Aside from the utility of digital methods for art historical analysis, Kelli Marshall and Miriam Posner explain the importance of an academic digital presence and practical suggestions for scholars.² The report compiled in 2014 by Matthew Long and Roger Schonfeld shares current methodological trends and recommendations for art history.³ The combination of these articles, blog articles by Posner and Marshall, and the report by Long and Schonfeld indicate that art history will be indistinguishable from digital art history in the future.

In Harald Klinke’s article, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” he seeks to define digital art history and asserts that it will become more than another method, but redefine the field of art history itself.⁴ He introduces the idea of “distant viewing,” a method of examination that involves analyzing large quantities of images, that will make digital methods an essential part of the research process.⁵ This process takes into account not just “masterworks” but also “lesser” works that fall short of high volumes of scholarly analysis. Digital methods, Klinke asserts, allow a macro-analysis that facilitates art historical analysis. Klinke indicates how these methods are changing the field’s curricula, role of the teacher, the department, and the discipline as a whole.⁶ Klinke believes that art history should adapt to accommodate these changes by including software and digital resource instruction in the curriculum. With this mode of instruction, the teacher transforms into a guide, and the department must intentionally create spaces for collaboration. This transition into a digital space allows for greater transdisciplinary collaboration.

Similar concepts of transdisciplinary collaboration, digital methods for macro-analysis, and the necessity to create shared spaces for collaboration are also present in the articles by Jaskot and Langmead. Jaskot theorizes in his article “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” that digital methods can help analyze the relationships between art and society.⁷ He writes that through network and spatial analysis of large quantities of data, reminding the reader of Klinke’s concept of “distance-viewing,” patterns can be illuminated to provide evidence for scholars’ claims. Klinke outlines four areas that digital methods are helpful to the study of art history: digital storytelling, text-based approaches, network analysis, and spatial analysis.⁸ He gives preference to network and spatial analysis as methods that present the greatest potential for productive scholarly analysis. Jaskot writes that macro-analysis necessitates collaboration, a conclusion reached by Klinke and Langmead.⁹

In her article, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Langmead explains that the humanities should not take innovations in technology for granted but instead continually engage with them. She points to the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop as an exemplary instance of productive engagement with technology and scholarly collaboration.¹⁰ Throughout her article, she traces the history of technology in the field of art history and asserts that a part of it is theatrical, like Wölflinn’s performance-like lectures in the late 19th-century.¹¹ While art history may have lost the social opportunity presented with the physical slide library in the digital age, Langmead explains that the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop is an example of a productive blend of scholarly collaboration and meaningful, analytical engagement with new digital resources.

Wasielewski and Näslund’s article, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” moves beyond defining digital art history and seeks to critically examine how digital tools have inevitably permeated the field.¹² Wasielewski and Näslund apply principles of critical theory to art history by looking inwards to be methodologically self-critical and to examine the social and political conditions of the external environment from the researcher’s subjective perspective.¹³ The authors also introduce the concept of the post-digital world, one that is inextricably linked to the digital sphere.¹⁴ Like Jaskot, Langmead, and Klinke, Wasielewski and Näslund outline the numerous ways in which scholars’ research inevitably uses digital tools to find sources, read, write, and collaborate with other scholars. Although digital practices may resign the scholar to the stereotype of the “isolated” researcher, a negative trend of the advent of the digital world that Langmead also refers to, digital resources open the field to wider audiences and present greater opportunities for collaboration.¹⁵

The report compiled by Long and Schonfeld examines the challenges and opportunities of the field of art history and offers practical recommendations to progress forward.¹⁶ The report, compiled over ten years ago, already found that art historians’ research unavoidably involves the internet and digital resources from primary and secondary source collection to compiling digital images for research. In its conclusion, Long and Schonfeld note that the methods and practices of art history research will increasingly rely on digital resources.¹⁷
Aside from the methodological application of digital resources, Marshall and Posner’s articles, written in a more conversational style, indicate the increasing necessity for academics to create and control their own digital presence.¹⁸ Both authors offer their own advice for maintaining an online presence specifically for academic professionals. Marshall suggests creating a website and building a social network while maintaining a consistent professional branding of oneself across these platforms, and Posner offers similar suggestions.¹⁹ These methods establish and protect the reputation of the academic professional.

After reading these materials, I noticed that my research and scholarly practice exists almost entirely within the digital space, but I do not use these resources beyond a more efficient substitute for notebooks and slides. Langmead’s article about using digital resources beyond reproductions of images made me reflect on ways that I could also incorporate macro-analysis or distance-viewing practices facilitated by digital resources that Klinke and Jaskot discussed in their respective articles. Marshall and Posner’s articles also made me consider my academic digital presence beyond personal connections. By standardizing my profile between my website and LinkedIn account, I hope to begin establishing my presence online as an academic. These articles indicate that digital resources will become essential to research methodology in the field of art history.

Notes
¹ Harald Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” in Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 32-42.
Paul B. Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019), 21-33.
Alison Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018).
Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” in Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, ed. Amanda Wasiewleski and Anna Näslund  (Intellect, 2024), 1-19.
² Kelli Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May 5, 2015).
Miriam Posner, “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics,” ProfHacker (February 14, 2011).
³ Matthew Long and Roger C. Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians” (Ithaka S+R, 2014).
⁴ Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 32.
⁵ Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 34.
⁶  Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 36-38.
⁷ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 23, 30.
⁸ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 24.
⁹ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 26.
¹⁰ Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 18.
¹¹  Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 4-5.
¹² Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 2.
¹³ Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 4-5.
¹⁴ Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 5.
¹⁵ Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 18.
Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 13.
¹⁶ Long and Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians,” 42-47.
¹⁷ Long and Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians,” 50.
¹⁸ Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic.”
Posner, “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics.”
¹⁹ Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic.”