Yesterday’s talks and workshops all emphasized how digital tools can enable new and exciting approaches to data comparison and scholarly collaboration, phenomena that have, historically, been powerful catalysts for change within the broader field of Humanities. Scholars shared impressive platforms that allow for new ways of aggregating and dissecting data on a scale that dwarfs what art historians, who traditionally work with a limited group of art objects, have previously attempted. From Lev Manovich‘s analysis of one million works of contemporary art from DeviantArt (or the entire arc of Van Gogh’s career) to the Google Art Project with its gigapixel images of museum masterpieces, we saw “big data” (in a relative sense) come to art history.

Many of the digital based projects presented have enabled small teams of scholars to come together to find not only new answers, but also to propose new, previously un-askable questions. Paul Jaskot’s lightning talk on his research project Holocaust Geographies focused on the scale of construction at Nazi concentration camps, and demonstrated how building projects were not merely secondary concerns in the daily life of these camps, and instead were intimately woven into the suppression—as well as the attempted rebellions—of the inmates. Stephen Murray’s truly excellent Mapping Gothic France web project revealed how these sorts of comparisons can be made useful to students; by allowing them to overlay renderings of different cathedrals from different time periods, students are able to more easily internalize stylistic changes in Gothic architecture across Europe, and to relate these to wider shifts in the political and cultural climate.

Ultimately, what impressed me about the sessions at THATCamp CAA was how they called to mind conditions similar to those that, according to Bruno Latour, prefigured the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. For Latour (see “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together), what precipitated these worldwide historic upheavals was not a change in man’s intelligence, Rationalism, or even scholars’ willingness to account for experimental data. The real catalyst, Latour argues, was that for the first time, scholars were able to compare observations based on a broad range of historic data, from both Eastern and Western sources. The laying side-by-side of these observations enabled scholars to spot errors in a systematic way and encouraged a wholesale rethinking of “truths” that had gone unchallenged for centuries. We may have to wait some time to see the fruits of these new comparative models enabled by digital technology, but I am confident that exciting new ways of looking and thinking are sure to result.

Mike Maizels, Predoctoral Fellow, National Portrait Gallery

I wanted to do a combined post on these two topics because they productively addressed many of the same issues. The pedagogy working group addressed a number of fundamental questions about how technology can make teaching more effective and more engaging for the students, and ideally, easier in certain ways for the professor.  While we agreed that there can be a steep learning curve for the adoption of technology, another factor to consider is the way in which this adoption can force a larger re-thinking of what one does in the classroom. A number of tools and techniques were discussed (including an exercise of letting the class put together the slide lecture on the fly with something as simple as google image search), but the platform of  Columbia University’s Media Thread (ccnmtl.columbia.edu/mediathread) provided an environment for tackling many of these challenges.

This software allows students and teachers to capture media from almost anywhere on the web, but it is particularly smoothly integrated with sources like Artstor and Youtube.  It allows embedding high resolution images and videos, which then creates the ground for a rich environment of tagging and annotating.  Students can analyze images with careful links to a specific detail of the painting, while professors can provide live feedback with fully integrated content.  The program allows a self-contained ecosystem—a kind of microcosm of scholarly discovery, collaboration and review which cannot help but prepare students for the 21^st century realities of content management and analysis both inside and outside the academy.

Mike Maizels, Predoctoral Fellow, National Portrait Gallery

This session focused on the way that changing technology has the tendency to work against the grain of established cultural habits, both within and outside the academy.  The rise of the digital seems to mean that we rethink not just how we present our scholarship, but what we present and why (for example, Smarthistory content is accessed by users in an incredible range of cultural contexts, all of whom can bring a rich array of background information towards a global conversation about the meanings of artworks).

Overall, the most pressing needs articulated were to be our own advocates.  Some argued for pressing forward with the adoption of models from the sciences (such as open peer review or rapid response publishing) that could make scholarly publication more open and dynamic. Others considered how conventions like citation need to evolve to stay current in a world of digital publishing. Many advocated for a revised model of evaluating the scholarly importance of digital material for tenure and promotion and suggested the inclusion of outside referees to ensure it received adequate recognition.  Perhaps the most interesting conversation arose as to how to archive digitally published material, which can have a disturbing short “shelf-life” compared with more traditional books or articles.  No consensus was achieved but many fronts were opened for further conversation and collaboration.

Mike Maizels, Predoctoral Fellow, National Portrait Gallery

As we emphasized in the opening session, the digital revolution in art historical teaching and scholarship is already here.  In the past few years, we have seen tremendous upheavals in the way we as art historians conduct our research, collaborate with our peers, publish our work and teach our students.  We live, as it was put in a memorable phrase, in a “do-it-ocracy,” where innovators are rewarded for pushing back the frontiers of not just what we know but how we can know it.

As I took it, the conference was set up to channel these upheavals in two specific directions.  The first, “lowering the reputation cost” will look at how we can reduce the professional risk to scholars, especially young ones like myself, for thinking outside the box.  For example, while digital journals are proliferating (more on this in a subsequent post), digital scholarship is often not given proper recognition for tenure and promotion.  The second goal is to harness the truly staggering number of people—hundreds of thousands from all over the world—who are already accessing art history resources on the web so that we can exponentially increase the effect of both our scholarship and our teaching.

Mike Maizels, Predoctoral Fellow, National Portrait Gallery

In the session “Digital Skills for Art History Students,” learning computer coding was compared to learning a foreign language. One participant went so far as to suggest that perhaps traditional art history graduate program language requirements could perhaps grow to include coding as a substitute for a language that might not be useful for specific students. As the importance of digital tools and digital humanities projects expands in academic settings could it become more useful for art historians to know how to code than to read German?

Depending on one’s area of interest this idea is definitely thought provoking, but is it valid? On the one hand, one can argue that the knowledge of coding can lead to digital projects which have potential for groundbreaking research and scholarship, not to mention the ability for an art historian to work sans collaborators, a costly and often time consuming consideration, for more basic projects. Possessing certain computer skills could be similar to having knowledge of multiple foreign languages in one’s tool kit.

However, for most art historians, we only learn how to read  languages. The ability to write, and often speak, in any language requires additional years of study which most of us do not have the opportunity to undertake. While it seems implausible that coding language could come to replace our need for knowledge of foreign languages or that we will require art historians to learn how to code as an additional stop on the road to a graduate degree, we do need to start thinking about incorporating digital tools into methods classes as they become a ever-more essential piece of our field. For now, at least, familiarity should probably remain more important than fluency with the tools.

Sara Ickow, Graduate student, Institute of Fine Arts

Two types of digital humanities projects seem to have been identified during discussion sessions at today’s THATCamp CAA 2013. In the session “The Digital Art History Portal” there was a call for a way to standardize, catalog and create a sustainable environment for digital art history projects to be peer reviewed and publicized. However, in an earlier session focused more on how students can make use of digital tools, the discussion focused on the flexibility and experimental nature of these types of projects.

Therefore, is there a need for support for these two types of uses simultaneously? Projects which are more collaborative and provide opportunities for testing and experimentation – providing alternatives to how we currently think of lectures and papers presented at conferences, and those which allow students and more established scholars to create “publishable” products. Both need a place to “live” and a community to ensure their future.

Nevertheless, projects which are considered more final, in line with how we now think of dissertations and books, do require more work in order to create a standard procedure for peer review that could give additional weight to students, recent Ph.D.s, or established scholars’ credentials.

Should we be thinking about distinct forums for these two modes of digital projects or do we need to find a way to put them both under the same umbrella?

Sara Ickow, Graduate student, Institute of Fine Arts

During the first day of THATCamp CAA 2013 several resources for Digital Humanities and Art History information and projects were mentioned in Lightening Talks and discussion sessions. Some represent potential models from other humanities fields while others represent a broad spectrum of DH resources. A few are listed below.

Bamboo DiRT

TAPOR: Text Analysis Portal for Research

Digital Humanities Now

DH Commons

Getty Research Portal 

Press Forward

Spatial History Project at Stanford

Nines.org

Sara Ickow, Graduate student, Institute of Fine Arts

Mediathread is CCNMTL’s innovative, open-source platform for exploration, analysis, and organization of web-based multimedia content. Mediathread connects to a variety of image and video collections (such as YouTube, Flickr, library databases, and course libraries), enabling users to lift items out of these collections and into an analysis environment. In Mediathread, items can then be clipped, annotated, organized, and embedded into essays and other written analysis.

Work in Mediathread can be shared with classmates or larger audiences, requiring students to formalize thinking, clarify interpretations, and improve arguments with evidence. A customized home page helps students track work being done by their classmates on shared items and projects. Instructors may also publish announcements, assignments, and model projects to the home page.

To get started with Mediathread in your course, send an email to ccnmtl-mediathread@columbia.edu.

The Mediathread is a Digital Bridges Initiative project.

Follow on twitter

visualizingvenice.org/beta/

Visualizing Venice, a project initiated by “a group of Faculty and graduate students in Architecture, Architectural and Urban History, and Engineering who seek to show how urban space evolves over time. Our project is educational and experimental, but we also hope that it will become a mode of public outreach that can explain place and space as evolving process. Visualizing Venice is a series of inquiries into how social and economic change shaped the city of Venice over time. Using documents and archival sources, collaborative groups of students map and model the process of change in the city.”

“In this article, we explore the dialogue between the local and the global art markets that established a distinctive dynamic for the British art world as experienced in London. Our analysis derives from two complementary data sets and visualizations. The first is a map plotting the locations of major London commercial art galleries between 1850 and 1914, authored by Pamela Fletcher and David Israel. The second is an analysis by Anne Helmreich, with the assistance of Seth Erickson, of sales data drawn from the stock books of Goupil & Cie, and its successor Boussod, Valadon & Cie, which cover transactions at the firm’s various branches located in Paris, London, The Hague, Berlin, Brussels, and New York during the years 1846–1919.[2]

Combining these two analytical fields—the geography of the London art market and the social and financial network of a retail firm situated within that landscape—is a first step toward our larger goal of representing, or perhaps more accurately, modeling, the full warp and weft of the London art market. The figure in the carpet, we argue, cannot be comprehended without a sense of the overall design; the significance of any one firm within the field—or the action of an artist—cannot be ascertained without a full understanding of the whole. But what defines that whole? Our discipline’s increasing recognition of the transnational conditions that shaped the production, reception, and consumption of art underscores the importance of this question.[3] It is particularly relevant for London’s art market, which was one of the most robust in the world in the nineteenth century. Its identity as a central hub in global networks of finance, trade, communication, and Empire made it a critical nexus in the international art market. In this article, we use the international reach of the firm of Goupil & Cie/Boussod, Valadon & Cie to define the geographic boundaries of our “whole.” Conceiving this article as both a summation of our projects to date and a building block for a larger study of the art market, we anticipate that subsequent data sets will allow us to expand these geographic parameters.”

Full article available here.

“I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.”

“But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?”

Full article available here.

Current debates on the subject of massive open online courses (MOOC)

“For all our good will, college in the U.S. has gotten worse for nearly everyone who relies on us. For some students—millions of them—the institutions in which they enroll are more reliable producers of debt than education. This has happened on our watch.

The competition from upstart organizations will make things worse for many of us. (I like the experiments we’ve got going at NYU, but I don’t fantasize that we’ll be unscathed.) After two decades of watching, though, I also know that that’s how these changes go. No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.

Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.”

Full article available here.

On Wednesday, November 28, “The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums” was hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and cosponsored by the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Art History and the Center for the Humanities.

“The digital humanities empower practitioners, museum staff and the public, with the tools and methods to re-ignite museums as civic centers of networked life.”

Neal Stimler is Associate Digital Asset Specialist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship that is informed by art history, cultural studies, digital technology, and sociology.

On Wednesday, November 28, “The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums” was hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and cosponsored by the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Art History and the Center for the Humanities.

William Noel is the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ director of the Special Collections Center and founding director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. He lead the greatly admired Archimedes Palimpsest project.

A recent article about Getty Voices and the Metropolitan Museum’s new multimedia site 82nd and Fifth published by New York based art and art history blog http://hyperallergic.com/

Kyle Chaya writes: “Museums are continuously pushing the envelope of how we experience the objects under their stewardship and access the work that they do. These features expose the side of the museum — the experts, the conservation work, the tireless scholarship — that were previously hidden from the public. Let’s hope there’s more of this transparency and more to appreciate in the future.”

ORBIS The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, “allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.”

Jasmine Pui writes, for History Today: “The first resource of its kind, ORBIS offers comprehensive graphic tools to portray the transport and communication infrastructure that underpinned the Roman Empire’s existence. […] An ORBIS visitor can traverse over 84,631 kilometres of road, including desert tracks, and 28,272 kilometres of rivers and canals, using 14 modes of road travel from camel caravan to military march and accurate, normative sailing times.”

lab.softwarestudies.com/p/research_14.html

The projects done at Software Studies Initiative are explorations in the growing field of digital humanities. The lab is developing theory and methods for the analysis of massive sets of images and video (cultural analytics).

The Digital Mellini a collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and the Department of Art History of the University of Málaga, Spain, takes an unpublished 17th-century manuscript—Pietro Mellini’s 1681 rhyming inventory of paintings and drawings from his family’s collection in Rome—as a point of departure.

The research team will publish the inventory online, building the manuscript into a more complex digital workspace that takes advantage of a wide range of technology tools and Web resources. The project will also explore Web 2.0 methods of social information gathering and sharing to create a new kind of living, collaborative publication that offers expanded opportunities for research and communication.

Read more on the project website, and a blog post by Susan Edwards on creating this complex on-line research platform.

mappinggothic.org/

www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1015

The Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project

smarthistory.khanacademy.org/

The Japanese Woodblock Print Search

ukiyo-e.org/

A web project created by John Resig, THATCamp CAA participant, computer programmer and avid enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints.

The site allows visitors to search through a catalogue of 208,000 Japanese woodblock prints or to take a picture of an existing print and to see similar prints across multiple collections.

Mark your calendars: Free Panel Discussion Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 6 – 8 p.m. at the New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, South Court Auditorium (Map and directions)

The Future of Art Book Publishing – Margaret Chace, Paul Chan, Sharon Gallagher, Chul R. Kim, Arezoo Moseni

In the face of Amazon.com, bookstore closures, self-publishing options, and shrinking library budgets, who is publishing art books and how are they reaching consumers and researchers alike? Commercial publishers and distributors, as well as independent and grassroots organizations, must confront the sea-change in how readers interact with the printed word. E-books and other digital formats are gaining in popularity for fiction readers and an increasing number of academic disciplines, yet very few art books meet the digital demand, even as more images of art are available online. Moreover, art books remain expensive to produce due to the necessity of high-quality, and often high-priced, image reproductions, among other vexing issues.

This panel, organized by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.,ARLIS/NY and in collaboration with Arezoo Moseni, investigates how diverse publishers approach their long term viability in the commercial and academic marketplaces.

What Is Omeka from Omeka on Vimeo.

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

[…] museums will have to change to take advantage of the turmoil roiling our colleagues in education.

We’ll need to be open and available. We need to let our collections be used by others for their ends. That means sharing online collections and images as open data, being open to collaborations, letting go.

It means that we need to break down the walls that separate curatorial expertise and educational expertise within the museum. Curators and curatorial knowledge will have to be open to the public. The one rule of the web is disintermediation: no more gatekeepers. Curators will need to be open directly to their audiences. Museum educators will need to know collections and content. Those jobs will merge as the museum opens up.

Passages from a recent article by Steven Lubar – Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. Read the entire piece on the Center for the Future of Museums Blog.

More on Steven Lubar’s excellent blog  

#Alt-Academy – a Media Commons project takes a grass-roots, bottom-up, publish-then-filter approach to community-building and networked scholarly communication around the theme of unconventional or alternative careers for people with academic training.

The #alt-academy project features contributions by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, who are working or are seeking employment — generally off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit — in universities and colleges, or allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations. Read more here.

Ernesto Priego: This may seem obvious to you or to others who are deeply involved in current discourses around higher education, but would you mind explaining what are the main obstacles that those without tenure-track jobs (either by choice or not) face, and how do you see an online platform like    #Alt-Academy challenging and offering alternative ways to established academic career paths?

Bethany Nowviskie: Well, it’s no surprise that most books and websites addressed to PhD students and scholars seeking jobs outside of the normative, tenure-track professorship stream have been cast as resources about “non-academic” careers. Social and institutional challenges face people who stay in or around the academy, but outside what has come to be seen as the single path to success and self-worth for humanities PhDs. A major one is the base assumption that you’re not doing academic or scholarly work if you’re not employed as a full-time teaching and research faculty member. Others relate to the job security and intellectual freedom that tenure is commonly accepted to provide — although several essays in the #Alt-Academy collection question that assumption

From Inside Higher ED July 2011 interview with #alt-academy coordinating editor Bethany Nowviskie, President of the ACH, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship (including the Scholars’ Lab) at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute

Scalar Platform — Trailer from IML @ USC on Vimeo.

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform
that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form,
born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble
media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing
in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.

Viewshare.org is a free web application for generating and customizing unique, dynamic views through which users can experience cultural heritage digital collections. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials. Contact us at ndiippaccess@loc.gov to request a free account. The site is administrated by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress.

Read here a blog post about Viewshare from Camille Salas, an intern with the Library of Congress.

The incredible detail revealed by the “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece” project. Presents a range of scientific photography. The website was created by Lasting Support, an Interdisciplinary Research Project to Assess the Structural Condition of Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece from Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

Released January 3rd 2013, the open-access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities. Edited by Matthew K. Gold, who writes in his introduction “The Digital Humanities Moment”

“At stake in the rise of the digital humanities is not only the viability of new research methods (such as algorithmic approaches to large humanities data sets) or new pedagogical activities (such as the incorporation of geospatial data into classroom projects) but also key elements of the larger academic ecosystem that supports such work.”

In her review for The Times Literary Supplement, Dilemmas of the Digital Humanists, Jennifer Howard writes:

“That spirit of open, collaborative experimentation inspires much of what digital humanists do, and it is one of their chief contributions to the humanities at large. This has the makings of a playful revolution. Digital humanists’ drive to experiment with literary, historical, philological and other kinds of data goes hand in hand with a desire to “hack the academy”– to expand or overturn the traditional machinery of the university. Scientists have long been used to the rapid exchange of ideas and findings. With a very few disciplinary exceptions, the publication-and-dissemination mechanisms of the humanities grind slowly.”

One of the most compelling projects out there, active since 2010, focusing on the early modern period:

republicofletters.stanford.edu

“Mapping the Republic of Letters is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international project in the digital humanities, centered at Stanford University. Since 2008, we have been creating visualizations to analyze “big data” relating to the world of early-modern scholars. We focus primarily on their correspondence, travel, and social networks. While we make use of quantitative metrics to examine the scope and dimensions of our data, we remain committed to the qualitative methodologies of the humanities. We actively encourage collaborations with other projects.”

See “Digitally Mapping the Republic of Letters,” New York Times blog post from November 16, 2010 and “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” an accompanying piece published also by the New York Times, November 16, 2010

Case study: The Grand Tour

Edited by Brett D. Hirsch. Full resource available here.

Authors: Peter Lunenfeld / Anne Burdick / Johanna Drucker / Todd Presner / Jeffrey Schnapp.

Free download here.

ImagePlot allows you to explore image and video collections of any size by creating visualizations which show images in a collection – or keyframes in a video – sorted in different ways. Both metadata and visual properties of images – which can be measured with ImageMeasure tool included with ImagePlot – can be used for sorting.

Read more here about ImagePlot

Under the heading Mellon Research Initiative: Digital Art History, the Institute of Fine Arts has made available recordings from their Digital Art history conference that took took place November 30 – December 1, 2012. Organized by Jim Coddington, Chief Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, as part of the Mellon Research Initiative at the Institute. The full program is available here.

Check out the tweet feed compiled by Diane Zorich.

Watch THATCamp CAA guest speaker Lev Manovich, Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of Software Studies Initiative lecture on: How to compare one million images? Visualization as a method in art history

THATCamp CAA guest speaker Stephen Murray, Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History at Columbia University discusses his project: Mapping Gothic France

Conference participant Anne Helmreich, Senior Program Officer at The Getty Foundation, on Markets and Networks: An Art Historian’s Journey into the Digital Landscape

Conference organizers and Smarthistory founders Beth Harris
and Steven Zucker ask “Is the discipline of art history (together with
museums and libraries) squandering the digital revolution?”

Read full article here

Digital Humanities Now editors highlight recent posts by Lev Manovich, Elijah Meeks, Michael Simeone, and Jason Mittell.

“I don’t know if my arguments will help us when we are criticized by people who keep insisting on a wrong chain of substitutions: digital humanities=statistics=science=bad. But if we keep explaining that statistics is not only about inferences and numbers, gradually we will be misunderstood less often.” Lev Manovich, the meaning of statistics and digital humanities

“It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities.
Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary
education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough
to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges and
universities may be the last faculty to enjoy such comparative
privilege. The future shape of the academy is hard to predict, except
to acknowledge that it is unlikely to remain static. Our profession is
being rapidly reconfigured, but many changes are not happening quickly
enough. In the realm of the digital, for example, entrenched
traditional standards of assessment, support, and recognition still
fail to encourage the kind of exciting new research that keeps our
disciplines vibrant.”

Sheila Cavanagh writes in “Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer
Review, Collaboration, and Open Access,” published in The Journal of
Digital Humanities Vol. 1, No. 4 Fall 2012

From a report sponsored by the Kress Foundation in partnership with the Roy Rosenweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, by Diane Zorich.

Many factors account for the current marginal status of digital art history. Among the most important are perceived threats to existing research paradigms and behaviors, outmoded reward structures for professional advancement and tenure, insufficient capacity and technology infrastructure, the absence of digital art history training and funding opportunities, problems with digital publishing, and the need for multidisciplinary partnerships to develop and sustain digital art history projects. Also contributing to this marginalization is an absence of dialogue among the community’s leadership – its professional organizations, funders, thought leaders, and research centers – about what art history will be in the 21st century, and the role digital art history plays in that scenario.

The report, Transitioning to a Digital World, can be downloaded here.

An article by James Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, from November 19th:

How Art History is Failing at the Internet

From the article:

…we aren’t conducting art historical research differently. We aren’t working collaboratively and experimentally. As art historians we are still, for the most part, solo practitioners working alone in our studies and publishing in print and online as single authors and only when the work is fully baked. We are still proprietary when it comes to our knowledge. We want sole credit for what we write. Scientists, social scientists, and engineers don’t work this way. They work collaboratively and publish jointly and quickly for professional review.