Digital art history: the American scene

Johanna Drucker, Anne Helmreich, Matthew Lincoln, Francesca Rose
2015 Perspective  
In the United States, as elsewhere, the continuous application and evolution of digital technology in art history research, publishing and teaching since the 1980s have had a profound impact on the discipline. The disappearance of slides in favour of digital images is widely cited as one of the first visible signs of the digital revolution challenging and revolutionising the discipline today. Digital tools have indeed led to a reshaping of the entire art history infrastructure, and to a renewal
more » ... of methods and practice in the manipulation, study, presentation and dissemination of images and texts. New thinking and fields of activity have emerged, ranging from extensive campaigns to digitise artworks, and primary and secondary textual sources, to the creation of increasingly rich, user-friendly databases, and online publications. Paralleling this is a growing awareness of the importance of taxonomy and the standardisation of data and formats to facilitate the large-scale sharing of digital files. Never before has the international art history community had access to such an extensive pool of resources. In this constantly-evolving landscape, it seems appropriate to question the contribution of 'digital art history' to the discipline as a whole, beyond the optimisation of research methods and access to resources. Does digital art history have the potential for foundational change, revolutionising the discipline and its core practices? 1 2 Digital art history enjoys increasing prominence in debates about the future of the discipline in the United States, as evidenced by the growing number of research and teaching programmes in the field, together with conferences, lectures and publications, discussions and posts about the topic across social media (blog, Google Hangouts, Storify, Twitter, etc.). A handful of researchers are spearheading this activity. In the space of just a few years, they have become the leading advocates and spokespeople for American digital art history. 2 Through their experimentation with digital tools for the organisation and visualisation of research data, they have contributed to a better definition of what is covered by the term "digital", and to debates concerning its implications for art history. Their projects fall broadly into four categories (these are also the categories comprising the digital humanities in the wider sense): text analysis, spatial analysis, network analysis and image analysis. 3
doi:10.4000/perspective.6021 fatcat:kn5h6gwtwvhzloiyr7zzmypa6a