Category Archives: Digital Art History

10/4/17

Leave a reply

§ Readings for today:

¶ President Paino’s Vision statement for UMW

“Investment of Hope” — 4 goals, each with action steps:

1 Service and social justice

2. Reconstitute the liberal arts for the digital age

3. “Immerse students in impactful learning experienes”

4. Diverse and conclusive community for success

What does a public institution look like with digital liberal arts?

¶ Bryan William Van Norden, “What’s with Nazis and Knights?” Huff Post, 9/19/17

¶ Nathan Heller, “What’s Roiling the Liberal Arts?” The Big Uneasy, The New Yorker, May 30, 2016

¶ Dorothy Kim, “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” In the Middle, August 28, 2017

¶ Dorothy Kim, “Race, Gender, Academia, and the Tactics of Digital Online Harassment,” SCS Newsletter (Sept. 2017), Medieval Studies and Harassment: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-newsletter-september-2017-medieval-studies-and-harassment

“This lack of a website has been a regular talking point for institutions and colleagues who have invited me out for lectures or workshops. It’s an inconvenience but one I plan to continue doing because of the mass of harassment I expect to get when Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies (forthcoming, ArcPress/WMU) comes out as it discusses online white supremacy (white supremacists/white nationalists/KKK/MRA etc.).”

§ See also:

¶ DK mentioned: Being Black at Michigan

¶ Establish a Social Media Policy, SCS

¶ Rebecca Mead, “The Troll Slayer, A Cambridge classicist takes on her sexist detractors,” The New Yorker, Sept. 1, 2014.

¶ Mary Beard, “Women in Power”

¶ Sarah E. Bond, “Why we need to start seeing the Classical world in color,” Hyperallergic, June 7, 2017.

“Most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi. This has an impact on the way we view the antique world. The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region. The Romans, in fact, did not define people as “white”; where, then, did this notion of race come from?”

¶ Colleen Flaherty, “Threats for what she didn’t say,” Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2017.

§ Pedagogical take-aways:

¶ Be patient, be diligent, teach awareness, have their back, support

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Leave a reply

For 9/13/17

Werner Herzog

“Will our children’s children’s children need the company of humans, or will they have evolved in a world where that’s not important?”

Lawrence Krauss, Cosmologist, Arizona State University

Teaching students to live with ambiguity

How does having the internet change our expectations of students?

Storytelling

“the web students bring me”

Sign up for a new app

Readings for 8/30/17

Leave a reply

First meeting of Digital Knowledge, Domain of One’s Own, DTLT:

Is digital changing everything, or is knowledge changing the digital?

Art history reading on digital art history?

Domain Fellows, started by Martha Burtis – take DoOO out of the classroom and into their lives.

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” http://schoolsites.schoolworld.com/schools/Cheltenham/webpages/cmanser/files/there%20will%20come%20soft%20rains%20(bradbury)1.pdf

https://youtu.be/LzhlU8rXgHc

https://youtu.be/Lf8-DzofGzI

See also Bradbury’s  The Veldt The World the Children Made, first published in The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950.

Audry Watters, The Web We Need to Give Students.” https://brightreads.com/the-web-we-need-to-give-students-311d97713713

An outsider looking in.

“Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.” Why is this radical?

David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosley Joined (2002). http://www.smallpieces.com/

Werner Herzog, Lo and Behold, documentary.

A Venice site

Leave a reply

I can imagine creating something like this with students about the city of Venice. The link is to The Virtual Lawn produced at the University of Virginia. There’s a great deal here that focuses on Jefferson and his architecture at UVA, but also the Renaissance architect Palladio, Humanism, ancient and Renaissance villas, and much more.

I also really like Frederic Kaplan’s Ted Talk on building an information time machine on the city of Venice. This would be a challenge here.

 

DMCI proposal

Leave a reply

My original proposal for participation in the Digital Media Commons Initiative at UMW:

“My seminars on Venice include an online exhibit; these are vehicles for art history majors to present research on the art, culture, history, and environment of this extraordinary city. (The exhibit from 2011 is available here.) The exhibits attract attention online, and this is rewarding for students. Nevertheless, there is no contact between our students and students elsewhere in the US or in Italy. This project aims to remove barriers by establishing connections with colleagues and students beyond UMW in the creation of a website on which students from several institutions could collaborate. My current Venice seminar and May study abroad program to Venice and Croatia can initiate these connections.

Art history is the study of visual communications over time. While art historians often work alone and in archives, we also work collaboratively and with the newest technologies. Art history at UMW supports both approaches. This project connects on-site archival study with online collaborative discoveries, and establishes connections that currently do not exist. I have not identified an online project like this elsewhere; its uniqueness and innovativeness would draw students to UMW, to the ITCC, and to the interdisciplinary study of art history. It is a natural fit for the ITCC because it speaks to the Center’s mission to “imagine, create, share, and learn.” The project re-imagines teaching and learning here at UMW as both a classroom and a global liberal arts experience. The ITCC will be an actual building, but it will also be a virtual space open to a global community with its heart at UMW.”

 

Online exhibits and digital art history

Leave a reply

A way of thinking about online exhibits?  “The wind of commerce hit museums harder than many universities. In some instances necessity occasioned the creation of good websites as the public face of the institution (interest logged via hits per week); in others it provoked a rethink of the mission of museums and a dumbing down to a lower common denominator, in displays, special exhibitions, and websites. Museums are in a state of flux because of computers and the Web: can/should technology be applied to these dusty mausolea of out-of-context artifacts to provide a learned, multimedia, immersive context – the nearest thing now possible to reintegrating the works with the context from which they were removed? Or is the museum of the future to be a theme park, lacking any truly educational mission, with Web displays as part of the fun? Believers in culture should hope for the former; but, as the inscription on Wren’s tomb nearly has it, Si monumentum requiris, cinumclicke.

Indeed, should we extrapolate from the existence of the Web to the decline of campus-based universities and physical museums and galleries? If galleries can only display a small proportion of their collection at any one time, should not funding go into web-based image databases?”

Michael Greenhalgh, “Art History”

In A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

 

Digital art history

Leave a reply

Working now on digital art history.  Here are some resources:

Diane M. Zorich’s report to the Kress Foundation on the role of digital scholarship in art history;  “Transitioning to a Digital World:  Art History, Its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship,” June 2012.

A post from Emory University’s Woodruff Library on Zorich’s report for the Kress Foundation.  Quick links here to digital art history projects cited in the report.

A post by Hasan Niyazi with references to recent discussions, December 2012.

Five participants in the Digital Art History Lab held March 5-7, 2013 at the Getty discuss the state of the field and the principles of networked scholarship:

• Hans Brandhorst, editor of the Iconclass system (http://www.iconclass.nl) and the Arkyves Web catalogue (http://www.arkyves.org/)

• Johanna Drucker, Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor Bibliography in the Department of Information Studies and founder of the Digital Humanities program at UCLA

• Emily Pugh, Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, and Web developer for the online journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

• Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Málaga, Spain

• Moderator: Susan Edwards, art historian and digital humanities technologist, J. Paul Getty Trust

Digital art history

Leave a reply

Here’s something I came across in the CAA News (May 22, 2013). “It’s time to rethink art history for the digital age,” by Nuria Rodríguez Ortega. It’s old news (March 5, 2013) from The Getty Iris, but something I need to think about now. Digital art history. Good references and questions, interesting comments. But it isn’t clear to me what “digital art history” looks like or how one does it. Anne Helmreich’s response resonates for me. “This points to another opportunity afforded by the multi-layered digital environment—that of including both one’s scholarly conclusions as well as the evidence on which these conclusions are based. This can be a daunting proposal—the equivalent, perhaps, of putting one’s file drawers out for public viewing. It also means making easily accessible a document that may have taken years of sleuthing to track down and identify. But it is also an exciting opportunity: such shared documentation can become a platform around which a robust and dynamic scholarly community can be formed. It also can help to push forward the development or adoption of intellectual argument in a more rapid (and global) fashion than was previously possible.” This is exactly the sort of thing we were discussing in the Domain workshop.

Here’s a great post on getting started in Digital Humanities by Lisa Sprio for the Journal of Digital Humanities (2011).