Digital Art History Research Articles

Biases within Digital Repositories: The Getty Research Portal

The influence of computer science on disciplines outside of itself has constituted hybrid communities of practice, such as the digital humanities (DH) and digital art history (DAH), the latter being an offspring of the former.[1] The questions asked within these interdisciplinary fields are substantially different from those in core computer science fields, such as systems theory, language theory, and theory of computation.[2] As a result of the interdisciplinary nature of their inquiries, research questions pertaining to DH and the ethical challenges that accompany them are diametrically opposed to the empirical and often unambiguous measures of validity to which computer scientists are accustomed. This article will explore ethical questions pertaining to collections aggregation systems from the perspective of postcolonial scholarship and seek paths towards addressing the ethical questions currently facing many DH projects. To do so, I will use the Getty Research Portal (hereafter, “the Portal”) as a case study of a digital repository and draw on my personal experience as a software developer working on the project, as well as on current research on biases and ethics within DH.

Digitalna povijest umjetnosti za mase? Uloga javnoga digitalnog laboratorija za povijesti umjetnosti

Digital Art History (DAH), which embraces massive datasets, innovative methodologies based on computational techniques, and collaborative paradigms, promises to offer new perspectives on the history of art. For example, DAH has the potential to shift the discipline’s focus from the traditional topics of inquiry to less explored aspects of the field—in short, to reposition the discipline’s central preoccupations with the issues of patronage, which are the concerns of the elite, to broader structures at work in a society, including the experiences of the marginalized. This displacement from center to periphery is not restricted to DAH research questions, but often applies to other aspects of DAH as well: to its status within the Digital Humanities (DH); to the demographic it frequently attracts; and to the infrastructure(s) developed to support it. Yet despite this potential, in many respects DAH occupies the periphery. This essay problematizes these issues as crystallized by the establishment of a digital art history lab at a privately funded library that serves the public, and explores one instance of how DAH has forced the North American academy to reflect further on the issues of privilege, access, and the future of art history.

Art Markets and Digital Histories

This Special Issue of Arts investigates the use of digital methods in the study of art markets and their histories. Digital art history or historical research facilitated by computer-technology in general is omnipresent in academia and increasingly supported by an infrastructure of seminars, workshops, networks, journals and other platforms for sharing results, exchanging notes and developing criticism. As the wealth of historical and contemporary data is rapidly expanding and digital technologies are becoming integral to research in the humanities and social sciences, it is high time to reflect on the different strategies that art market scholars employ to navigate and negotiate digital techniques and resources.

Going Digital? New Media and Digital Art at the Stedelijk

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has an extensive collection of time-based media art from the 1960s onwards, which has been expanded into the digital field in recent decades. The Stedelijk makes an interesting case study for this special issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age,” because it has had a reputable history of dealing with time-based art since the mid-1970s but presently faces the same challenges with regard to curating and collecting digital art as other museums of modern art. The Stedelijk’s history began in 1974, when the first curator for time-based art was hired, Dorine Mignot, a pioneer in this field. After Mignot’s retirement in 2006, the museum was closed for almost a decade, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf (2014–2017), an innovative agenda was set again for new media and digital art. In this paper, Sjoukje van der Meulen mobilizes the museum’s rich and varied history of new media and digital art to think through some of the issues, challenges and concerns raised by guest editor Francesca Franco for this special issue such as “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting artworks made in the 1960s and the 1970s?” and “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”

ORION—Art Collections and Collectors in Portugal

ORION is a digital art history research-oriented project focused on the study of art collections and collectors in Portugal, supported on a relational database management system. Besides the obvious advantage of organizing and systematizing an enormous amount of information, promoting its analysis, this database was specifically designed to highlight the relationships between data. Its relational capacity is not only one of the most relevant features of ORION, but a differentiating quality, one step forward in comparison to other international databases and studies that use digital methodologies. This article discusses the methods and the advantages of using ORION in research related to the history of collecting, art markets and provenance of art objects in Portugal, where it is the very first time that an approach such as this is intended, looking for a systematization of data that paves the way to the emergence of new research questions. Furthermore, and because ORION aims to share the data and knowledge with other projects, institutions and researchers, the database uses different international standards, such as data structure (CIDOC-OIC and Getty-CDWA), controlled vocabulary (Iconclass, Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)) and communication and exchange of information (CIDOC-CRM).

Digital Art History

This introduction frames and situates this special issue of Visual Resources on the topic of digital art history, intentionally assembled five years after the journal’s previous digital art history issue with the goal of assessing the progress made in the field and encouraging more widespread adoption of digital methodologies. It sets forth the key themes of this issue: “thought pieces” on the state of digital art history and its value for scholarship and pedagogy; the significance of databases for art history and the intellectual complexities they entail; innovative computational analysis applied to material and social-historical questions in art history; and the possibilities engendered by online publishing. These foci are developed through and grounded in critically informed scholarly projects in digital art history. These projects also bring to light professional, cultural, social, linguistic, and even political issues encountered in practicing digital art history.

Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods

Can we have a critical art history using digital methods? To answer this question, we need to ask what are the critical questions in art history that demand and are best suited to specific digital methods? This article argues that asking a critical question involves taking up the long art-historical tradition of the social history of art. Social art history is not satisfied with a social context for art, but rather reverses this equation by arguing that an analysis of art, artist, and audience must tell us something structurally about society. It is these kinds of questions that critically engage in broader art-historical debates. When questions such as these rely on large bodies of evidence – which they often do if “society” is their focus of study – then the scale of the project is, in today’s context, best suited for digital methods. In sum, digital art history lets us address the tradition of the social history of art in new ways. The following essay seeks to advance a nuanced triangulation between our art-historical topics of study, our methodological debates, and computational analysis. In specific terms, exploring alternative subjects of art history as well as the particular analytical methods of social art history opens up the debates in the discipline to a more critical intervention with digital methods.

Digital Art History: The Questions that Need to Be Asked

This paper provides a critical overview of the evolution of the field of digital art history since the 2013 special issue of Visual Resources dedicated to digital art history. I particularly review the narratives and results that have been generated during the development of this specific field of research, examining to what degree these can or should be re-evaluated in light of the post-digital society in which we find ourselves, and as part of post-humanistic thinking. Thus I combine a historical overview with a prospective focus on digital art history in the years to come.

Digital Tools and Technical Views: The Intersection of Digital Art History and Technical Art History in a Digital Archive on the Painting Technique of Caravaggio and His Followers

Digital art history is currently moving into a new phase. As a result of the ongoing digitization of artifacts and the creation of large digital repositories that bring together literary sources, images, as well as historical and technical data, new perspectives point to data mining and data/image processing. This article reviews some of the main data and image bases that deal with technical and material studies on works of art. The work-in-progress, Technical Data/Image Base on Caravaggio and His Followers, of the Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte/Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome, Italy) is presented within a historical and theoretical framework, describing the establishment of technical research in art history and the role played as early as 1930 by the International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods in the Examination and Conservation of Artworks (Rome). The state of the art of technical research on the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi, Il Caravaggio (1571–1610) and its critical issues are also sketched out, and the nature of the scientific information provided by digital multispectral imaging is considered within a brief review of the history of technical images.

Digital Art History and the Museum: The Online Scholarly Collection Catalogues at the Art Institute of Chicago

This article considers the various ways that the Art Institute of Chicago’s digital scholarly collection catalogues engage with art history in the digital realm. Since 2009, when the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) was invited by the Getty Foundation to participate with a group of other museums to create a platform for museum collection catalogues online, the AIC has been a leader in this growing field. The digital platform we designed has proven to be the ideal vehicle to present our research in a dynamic manner. Through several case studies, we will demonstrate how these publications have not only made contributions to the field of digital art history through the presentation of primary archival source material online, but have also facilitated the incorporation of digital art history into our methodological toolbox. This paper also discusses the challenges of digital publishing as compared to more traditional, print-based workflows.

Born Digital: Early Career Researchers Shaping Digital Art History

In October 2017, the authors co-organised an international conference for early career researchers (ECRs) entitled ‘Digital Art History: Practice and Potential’ (#DAHPP). This ambitious event, held between The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The Courtauld Institute of Art, brought together ECRs working independently and at major institutions in Austria, China, France, Portugal, America, and the United Kingdom, all of whom use digital technologies to support and disseminate research. Through a lens focused by Diane M Zorich’s assertion that ECRs are more likely to “think through technology”, this article demonstrates how emerging scholars are engaging with digital technology in conjunction with established art-historical methods and theories in an integrated practice. Drawing on digital projects presented at #DAHPP, we reflect on the intellectual, logistical and methodological focal points arising from the event, discussed in four sections: the centrality of digital technology to ECRs’ research practices and the need to generate discussion around this in light of the professional challenges we face; the growing prevalence of digital re-constructions as both research tool and vehicle for communicating with a broad audience; digital methods for dealing with data, how this can disrupt bias within conventional art-historical study; and how we address questions of veracity and authenticity.

Slow Digital Art History in Action: Project Cornelia’s Computational Approach to Seventeenth-century Flemish Creative Communities

This paper presents the rationale, genesis, and applications of Project Cornelia, an ongoing computational art history project developed by a cross-disciplinary team at the KU Leuven (University of Leuven). It shares practical perspectives acquired while conceptualizing and unfolding the project and discusses successes as well as challenges and setbacks. In doing so, this paper is a cautionary tale for art historians entering the digital arena. However, it is also an invitation to connect to Project Cornelia. Art historians seeking to avoid heavy start-up costs and willing to embed their research in a larger empirical and theoretical framework can easily share their data and use Cornelia’s data and tools to further their and our understanding of the genesis and governance of early modern creative communities and industries.

Bridging the Research/Teaching Divide with DAH and SoTL-AH

This paper explores the potential for rigorous pedagogical scholarship to complement developments in digital art history (DAH). In addition to introducing ideas and methods that characterize scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education, we focus on two major themes: how digital tools and techniques can support robust scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH) and ways that SoTL-AH can be used to evaluate and demonstrate the impact of DAH projects in the classroom and the public realm. Our goal is to encourage greater exchange between these two emerging fields that can together advance art historical study.

Between art and application: Special issue on emoji epistemology

This special issue, curated by Joel Gn and Crystal Abidin, provides an investigation of the uses and impacts of emoji within the domains of culture, race, language, and art and commerce. Considering the broader socio-cultural implications of emoji and the various ways that emoji negotiate and mediate the tenuous boundary between art and application, the eight papers draw from disciplines including media studies and communications, sociology and digital anthropology, literary studies and art history, and philosophy, and are authored by (mostly) Early Career Researchers.

Der Berliner Kunstmarkt: An Analysis of the Berlin Art Market, 1930–1945

The authors investigate Berlin’s art auction market as it developed between 1930 and 1945. By analyzing Berlin’s auction data from the Getty Research Institute’s recently published database of German auction sales catalogs dating from 1930 to 1945, this paper explores the Third Reich’s influence on the Berlin fine art auction market. The analysis is separated into two main categories: the overall market and the auction houses, in particular a close examination of the auction houses Graupe and Lange. Key findings include the inverse relationship between median selling price and the number of paintings sold over several years, indicating that paintings sold in Berlin during this time functioned more like normal goods rather than luxury items; the interconnected relationship between the ownership and operations of many auction houses, including Graupe’s transition to Lange after fleeing from anti-Semitism in Berlin; and the evidence that stolen artwork was auctioned for sale on several occasions, with most of the proceeds benefitting Hitler’s Nazi regime.[This article is a revision of the paper that won the 2018 Sotheby’s Institute of Art Research Award. The award recognizes excellence in a student paper or digital art history project on a topic relevant to collecting or the art market. This paper was presented as part of the “New Voices in the Profession” panel at the ARLIS/NA conference held in New York, New York, in February 2018.]

What Could Have Bean: Using Digital Art History to Revisit Australia's First World War Official War Art

On his journey back to Australia in 1919, official war correspondent and historian Charles Bean wrote a detailed proposal for an Australian war memorial museum that included sketches of the facade ...

MapTap and Cornelia Slow Digital Art History and Formal Art Historical Social Network Research

Abstract The essay introduces MapTap, a research project that zooms in on the ever-changing social networks underpinning Flemish tapestry (1620 – 1720). MapTap develops the young and still slightly amorphous field of Formal Art Historical Social Network Research (FAHSNR) and is fueled by Cornelia, a custom-made database. Cornelia’s unique data model allows researchers to organize attribution and relational data from a wide array of sources in such a way that the complex multiplex and multimode networks emerging from the data can be transformed into partial unimode networks that enable proper FAHSNR. A case study revealing the key roles played by women in the tapestry landscape shows how this kind of slow digital art history can further our understanding of early modern creative communities and industries.

Digital art history: the American scene

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 renew...

Pamela Fletcher. Essay on "Reflections on Digital Art History."

Pamela Fletcher. Essay on "Reflections on Digital Art History."

Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student and Faculty Collaboration

Over the last two decades, teaching, learning and research in higher education have developed a growing digital presence. Digital development in the humanities has been slow relative to most other areas in academia, and with some exceptions art and art history have enjoyed slow digital growth within the humanities. Within this environment, the article here presents one collaborative model for digital art history, rare in its exclusive focus on undergraduate “junior scholars”. Undergraduate senior-level art history and studio art students at Providence College collaborate annually with art history and studio art faculty to publish their senior theses in print format as the Art Journal. In the last few years, students, faculty and digital library staff have enhanced this collaboration to include the publishing from process to product of the Art Journal as a complementary digital Art Journal. They collaborate in creating digital art history and digital studio art in order to bring exponentially greater meaning, significance and visibility to the students’ senior culminating works through real-world digital publishing, including quality control, copyright issues and ideas related to persistent access and ongoing global visibility for the scholarly and creative works and for the student scholars. These students function as real-world collaborative scholarly partners in publishing their culminating academic and artistic work globally and persistently accessible in Providence College’s digital repositories. This case study evidences engagement in meaningful digital knowledge creation focused on the intellectual and creative output of student-scholars and student-artists (art historians and studio artists) as a model for other student-faculty-digital library professional collaborations.