The modules in this course contain information that is generally applicable across humanistic fields, and more particularly applicable to history. However, they also reflect a general bias within DH towards textual objects as opposed to visual and material ones. This module is intended to provide you with a space to focus on how DH can be practiced by those who work with visual and material objects, particularly within the field of art history.
Readings/Discussion
1. read Pamela Fletcher, “Reflections on Digital Art History,” College Art Association Reviews, June 18, 2015.
2. read Benjamin Zweig, “Forgotten Genealogies: Brief Reflections on the History of Digital Art History,” International Journal for Digital Art History 1 (2015).
3. read Claire Bishop, “Against Digital Art History,” International Journal for Digital Art History 3 (2018).
4. read Claire Bailey-Ross et al, “Aesthetic appreciation and Spanish art: insights from eye tracking,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34 (2019).
5. read Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton, “Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34 (2019). (OPTIONAL: if you’re really excited by this, find more about the project on their distant viewing website, including their book Distant Viewing and their Distant Viewing Toolkit.)
6. read Johanna Drucker, “The Museum Opens,” International Journal for Digital Art History 4 (2019).
7. OPTIONAL: read Johanna Drucker, “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?,” Visual Resources 29, no. 1–2 (2013): 5–14. AND this article that responds to it Impett, L., & Offert, F. (2022). There Is a Digital Art History. Visual Resources, 38(2), 186–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2024.2362466
8. OPTIONAL: read Diana Seave Greenwald, Painting by Numbers: Data-driven Histories of Nineteenth-century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).
9. OPTIONAL: read Christina Kamposiori, Simon Mahony, and Claire Warwick, “The impact of digitization and digital resource design on the scholarly workflow in art history,” International Journal for Digital Art History 4 (2019).
10. participate in the class discussion
Technical Activities
1. none! Many of the methods discussed in the above reading require programming skills that I do not assume you have. Other analyses employ the same or similar methods that we are learning in other modules and don’t need to be repeated here.