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.
[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.
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