Though I’m currently managing an online publishing project that has me thinking about the ways in which we can improve the print glossary form online, I also routinely use glossaries in teaching as I find that building a lexicon over the course of a term is an excellent way to surface confusion about terms–particularly art historical or museological ones–and to stimulate discussion amongst classmates about key concepts and ideas. But I’m still waiting for easier-to-use and more robust glossary-building tools for this purpose as well.

I know that this topic overlaps with some of the others that have been proposed about online publishing and teaching tools and methods–it can, perhaps, be combined in discussion with those.

Sorry to be so late to the discussion! I’m looking forward to meeting everyone at camp this week, despite my tardiness.

I would also be interested to hear from people already involved in these projects about how they imagine the various interactive and study tool components in this products actually working in the classroom. What was the logic in the design of the interactive/study components and how do the people who designed them use them in their own teaching?

But my main interest is in discussing how digital tools can be adapted to enhance the small liberal arts classroom, with ca. 20-50 undergraduates for the intro and intermediate level, topical lecture course.

I would also like to discuss ways in which students can maintain art history blogs that are insightful and academically challenging. I have assigned my online students to maintain art history blogs for the past several academic quarters, but I am continually looking for ways to make these assignments meaningful and yet also beneficial from an academic perspective.

Are there any bloggers out there?

Art history and the humanities are under attack in an education system and culture under intense pressure to conform to an economic model. How can new technologies be used to permanently reverse this situation? How can new tools help us to improve the working conditions of art historians everywhere and aggressively expand the discipline globally? How can we use the Internet to affirm the centrality of the humanities, but particularly art history, not only to the mission of colleges and universities everywhere, but to the development and growth our communities and all our collective and individual endeavors?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAl–5ScYrU
www.facebook.com/ArtHistoryGuild

Like others, I first saw the potential of gaming for art history through
recent games like Assassin’s Creed, but I’m not from the generation
that grew up with gaming as an integral part of the culture. I’m struck
by the sheer visual beauty and detail of recent games, but discouraged
by the (for me) tedious nature of the gameplay. AFAIK the basics of
games remain: scoring points, beating enemies, and episodic storytelling
via battles. How might these structures inform the art exhibition, the
art book?

What could an art museum exhibition learn from the structures and interaction patterns of games–from simple RPGs to massively multiplayer games? I dunno…I’m imagining a beloved and popular exhibition (King Tut? Alexander McQueen? All the Monets in the world?) getting revisited by its fans through Let’s Play recaps, not to mention fanfic retellings of the show’s narrative, Photoshop manip contests . . .

And I’m interested in what these folks are doing, though the focus seems to be on K-12: www.learninggamesnetwork.org/

Secondly, I recently read Victoria Szabo’s article (see below) that argues that database design, as well as data visualization techniques, should now become an integral part of art-historical research and presentation practices. What can we learn from English and History? Are there more CASE STUDIES to share?

Szabo, Victoria “Transforming Art History Research with Database Analytics: Visualizing Art Markets “Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North AmericaVol. 31, No. 2, Fall 2012, (pp. 158-175)
DOI: 10.1086/668109
Stable URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668109

In general my response was to the place of art history at places like the annual Digital Humanities conference and the NEH ODH startup grants which are often lacking in art historical work and are places where the critical eye of art historians could be valuably applies.

Sistine Chapel (or any ensemble of wall and ceiling frescoes)-preliminary drawings, sinopie or cartoons. giornate, additions al secco, relation of the space to liturgy and liturgical calendar, Orlande de Lassus’ Prophetiae sibyllarum listened to and analyzed alongside Michelangelo’s sibyls, relation of ceiling to Julius tomb projects, of ceiling to walls and tapestries, of Michelangelo’s to Raphael’s prophets, study of texts of sermons preached there.

Lustreware ceramics-the nature of the clay and glazes and their sources and dissemination routes revealed on digital maps, the structure of the kiln, its heat and smell, cost and workings, sound and appearance; the nature of a failed pot, of which there were many for every successful one, the contents of the finished vessels, contemporary documents that mention them

A Baroque church or chapel-Examine simultaneously its design, its patron, the music performed in it, the sermons preached in it, its stylistic formal antecedents, its non-ecclesiastical, aristocratic prototypes, the relics it contained, the pilgrims these attracted, the subsequent buildings it influenced, its decoration, furniture and structural logic.

I propose a session which can produce specific, detailed templates such as have been hastily sketched above.

The value of digital tools is that they are not single purpose: the same components in a web site or digital collection can be unpacked for pedagogical use and scholarly presentation in the lecture room, the laboratory or in the creation of a one-time, albeit replicable, spectacle, with the goal of achieving optimal practice of Art History in all its Baxandallian richness.

Museum web staff are creating open repositories of collections information. Making it available through APIs, as downloadable data, or through code repositories like Github. These are often intended for the hacker/maker community rather than a curatorial/art-research audience. The makers know how to manipulate the data for their purposes, but often their non-subject-matter-expert created projects have little lasting impact — it’s a cool one-off but the institution and external researchers take little notice.

Of course, it makes sense. The web staff often have little interaction with research staff, and researchers wouldn’t know how to work with the datasets. But what are the actual data requirements of researchers? What atomic elements from collection records are actually needed? (Everything isn’t a valid answer.) What kinds of machine processing are most common on aggregate data?

Should the improvements be on the database side? Should the tech-savvy staff be expected to bake-in some linguistic analysis into new summary data tables? Maybe some summary statistics? Precomputed visualizations?

Should the enhancements be to the API? Should the responsibility be on the part of the researchers to learn enough to be dangerous with more powerful API calls? More than just pulling down names and dates, but learning enough programming to be able to create compelling tools without having the tech staff presuppose their needs?

However, as an art historian, who works on ancient art in
the Americas, where many cultures did not use a writing system, I find the
analysis of images particularly pertinent. In some case, the pictorial and
iconographic systems that emerged in the various cultures were so standardized and
conventionalized that scholars have likened them to texts; indeed these systems
frequently also had linguistic components. Could digital tools developed for
the analysis of texts be reconfigured and applied to such visual systems of “writing”?
Another aspect is the visualization of art, which can support and advance the
digital analysis of images. What interesting projects are already underway? And
how can we as art historians advance this field, which seems to be used more by
archaeologists and conservators?

Examples:
UCLA Visualization Portal: idre.ucla.edu/gis-visualization/projects-partners
CyArk: archive.cyark.org/
3D Scanning Project at Copan by Peabody Museum: www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/821

I am also curious to learn what others might doing using digital object images and what kinds of questions they are asking, what they are learning.

Ideally, the “game” would be expanded to include short entries about the individual works, so that if an image interested a student, he or she could clink on the image and access useful information.There would be a drop-down menu or a sidebar so that students could access the exact information they wanted, from subject matter or sitter to patron. I am wondering if such a game/resource could overlap with museum websites (perhaps link to their catalog entries) and photo archives (perhaps link to records in the RKD and the Frick Art Reference Library) although I suspect copyright would be a problem. What I am hoping for in the short run is a replacement of the survey textbook (which a number of participants have noted is not working anymore); in the long run, I am hoping for an interactive technology that will encourage students to see the production and consumption of art as a complex system rather than the mastering of facts. So, this is a very long way of saying—I would really like to attend this session, please. It would be a great help to learn what others think of this. I also would be grateful for any input regarding the re-purposing of museum online collections from those interested in museum education and technology. And if anyone interested in reworking the survey has any ideas about the text, I would be excited to hear from you. (Could such a non-linear approach to providing information, i.e. clicking away on images and sidebars, thus allowing the student to access the information they find interesting, work? Is this anarchy?) And, finally, if there is interest, perhaps Marian might be lured into offering ideas for funding?

1) how graduate education has changed (or more likely hasn’t and should–Art History is a tremendously conservative field in the Humanities) but outliers and models would be great to learn about–i suspect we may want to look abroad

2) what change might be feasible within the current parameters? I would like to start small(er) and look at Masters programs, not just PhD granting institutions, since I see MA programs by definition as dealing with a set of students with broader interests (and influence), whose impact could perhaps be more important because of that range.

Ditching the Textbook: A Primer

Talk is cheap and this workshop is for action. The workshop will have two parts: 1) identify the essential components of a digital textbook-replacement for a survey-level art history class and 2) assemble the essential components for a digital survey textbook.

By the end of the workshop, all participants will have an understanding of how to create a digital textbook, experience in creating one, and will leave the workshop with a skeleton textbook that can be expanded and adapted for individual use.

Let’s share experiences: I’ve been to an NEH-funded training institute, have had some success working with librarians and historical institutions on beginning a project; what has worked for others?

I would like to propose a general discussion session on how digital technology can be utilized within methodological approaches to art history – brainstorming applications, appropriate software, etc. I am particularly interested in how various Geographic Information Systems, SEASR (seasr.org/), or Network Workbench (nwb.cns.iu.edu/) can be utilized to map out data and assist in analyzing art historical data. Perhaps this session could be linked somehow to the proposed sessions on D3, museum technologies and ImagePlot software.

a) text analysis

b) image analysis

c) spatial analysis

d) network analysis

I believe a session in which we could could brainstorm together significant and
worthy research questions that could be answered using one (or more) of these
methodologies (and then, if time permits, figuring out what tools, if any, exist
to do the proposed project.)

Some sites that might be useful for opening up the discussion re. methodologies and tools:

Digital Research Tools/Project Bamboo: dirt.projectbamboo.org/

Digital Humanities Methodologies at Oxford: digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/

Stanford University, Digital Humanities: toolingup.stanford.edu/

If I had to priority rank- I would put text analysis first because I am
frankly surprised that art history has not taken this up more readily given how
heavily we rely upon text-based sources.

In the past, art publishers have pushed the limits of the industry to incorporate new technologies ranging from chromolithography to facsimile-quality color separations into their books. Debates about image rights in ebooks, however, have pushed art publishers to the back of the digital innovation line.

While the photo is far from dead, new technologies for representing objects and art historical data are popping up every day. Examples include:

Deep zooming: zoom.it/
Hybrid 2D/3D models: photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=014a6ec8-eecd-407f-8f18-17a99ff89345
Photorealistic models: www.hypr3d.com/models/4f46502102171d000100000f
And navigable virtual environments: dl.dropbox.com/u/17418706/SAWebPlayer.html

How can we integrate these new technologies into digital publications in exciting and meaningful ways – ways that will make the institutions hoarding image reproduction rights super jealous! How might giving readers the ability to zoom or explore virtual spaces necessitate changes in the way we write? Come write an illustrated manifesto with me!

I’d like to propose a working session to develop a data visualization using D3: d3js.org/ . We could start by looking at some visualizations made with D3 and a brief overview of the library’s strengths, as well as a discussion of illustrative vs. analytical visualizations (brush up on your Tufte!). Then we could get into brainstorming meaningful visualizations and hacking on a preliminary visualization that I’ve been working on, either of the conservation data from a medieval manuscript or of something else that I come up with between now and the camp, possibly geospatial.

alexanderbrey.com/experiments/conservation.html

D3 also excels at presenting streaming data, so part of this workshop could be exploring the applications of dynamic visualizations in a field which is perceived as static, even by many of its practitioners.

Warning: I am an art historian who took a year of Java, NOT a computer scientist. I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee my explanations will be lucid, or even correct. Javascript and the Document Object Model still baffle me sometimes. This is the wild west of digital humanities, so be ready to get your hands dirty with some code in github.

– Maya Jiménez, Kingsborough Community College (CUNY)
– Ananda Cohen Suarez (Cornell University)

Perhaps this has already been proposed, but I’m interested in running a working session on new tools for managing art knowledge online, anything from the semantic web graphs and ontologies for art collections to social networks coordinated around art tastemaking algorithms. I’m interested in predictive modeling of collections management and retrieval as well as new systems for storing, archiving and machine learning to curate art preferences through crowdsourced and content curation math. I’m interested in how people are attempting to diagnose and engineer art taste online focusing on things not strings.

Some examples of services/art libraries/social collections I’d like to dissect:

Art.sy: art.sy/

Art Stacked: theartstack.com/

S[edition]: www.seditionart.com/signup

The distribution of printed images, a communication technology of the 15th century, and the internet, have several features in common, such as their abilities to share information, and opinions among audiences who otherwise might not connect.
This session has two purposes. The first is to share resources that allow for the study of printed images online, and second, to discuss how these resources open new avenues of scholarship, or set limitations on the study of printed images. The outcome will be some understanding of the intersection of online images and print scholarship, and the formulation of suggestions of how to make resources more useful to historians of prints.

Also, I’m particularly interested in how museum libraries are embracing these technologies. There are really two sides to this question. First, what technologies (journal databases, OPACs, online indexes, digital collections, etc.) are they using to support research? And second, what technologies can be used to instruct library users?

I propose a general discussion session focused on the research process and on the role technology plays in each step of that process. How do specific technologies complement or change an artist’s or art historian’s methods for creating an end product? What technologies are on his or her wish list for future research projects?

Best,

Suz

When I consider purchasing electronic art books from our library vendor, there is no indication anywhere on the website whether images in the book have been redacted. I can preview a certain number of pages on the vendor’s website, but if I don’t happen to run across a page where an image is supposed to be before the preview ends, I won’t
know whether all the images are there or not. Previewing to find out if I’m getting what I’d be paying for can take up to 5 minutes, and in the end, I still may not know.

Art librarians have complained to the library vendors who say they receive their metadata from e-book distributors, and can’t possibly do the work to see if all the images are there and add this into their records given the volume they work with. E-book distributors make the exact same claim—they say they receive their metadata from publishers, and can’t possibly review each title to modify the metadata when
images have been redacted. Publishers are typically indifferent to our frustrations because they are not often very enthusiastic about the idea of libraries acquiring electronic art books in the first place.

If I do buy an electronic art book, and discover images have been redacted, I can’t “return” the purchase. The final insult: catalogers have explained they too have no time to discover the problem, so when the electronic record appears in our online catalogs,
there is no hint that the book is incomplete.

Frankly, I’ve heard image related frustrations from readers in other fields too: scientists have complained that e-books sometimes have graphs and charts that are too small to be eye readable, with no mechanism for making them big enough to read.

How can librarians and scholars work together to pressure publishers to supply e-book vendors more honest meta-data about the electronic books they are offering?