Present: Kirsten Atagus, Sheila Beonde, Betty Leigh Hutchenson, Dene Grigar, Emily Pugh, Gail Feigenbaum, Alexandra Oliver

Introduction: Kirsten is working collaboratively with a computer scienctist to develop a model for tracking patterns of celestial/solar movements in relation to a particular architectural site. Her question: how to publish this work in a way that accurately represents the data and can be recognized as legitimate research?

Questions:

• Desktop v. online?
• Visualizations v. narrative text description?
• Is it important to be able to separate the data from the platform?
• Is the goal to arrive at some kind of stable form or distribute the data, material, components across materials across several databases or platforms?
• Are we limited by the notion of “publish” (what is “digital publishing”? Is it wider?)

Awesome points people made:

• don’t be too apologetic about doing DH projects – there’s value in asserting the value of digital work
• frame the projects in a way that tenure committees or other gatekeepers can understand (if not “research”, then perhaps public intellectual contributions, pedagogy)
• books are outmoded because they fail to take advantage of the multiplicity and sophistication of new presentation tools
• “publication” may not be the best way to think about digital presentation
• archival preservation of data may be different from publication
• still and moving images are now a reality of several kinds of publication, but sound, smell and touch are still a way off

To dos (in no particular order):

• match technological platforms for publication with different audiences
• rewrite tenure promotion guidelines to recognize new products
• preserve what we like about the book – and discard the rest
• change not just technology, but academic culture
• develop guidelines for peer review (NEH and others have already been doing this)
• pedigreeing rather than publishing: consider alterantive ways of identifying the value of DH work: not just peer review, but number of downloads, page views, screenings, prizes…

Upcoming: Emily Pugh’s organizing a panel for CCA 2015 on these issues – get in touch if you’re interested!

More: Kirsten noted and uploaded all the publications and resources discussed during this panel!

Michelle Moravec will present a lightening talk titled “Visualizing Schneemann explores the production of histories of art using multiple digital tools.”  The artist’s correspondence is explored through data visualization (Raw), network analysis (Gephi) and corpus linguistics (AntConc).

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1. What is your current involvement with “digital art history”?

For the past 20 years I’ve been studying the links between feminist art and the women’s liberation movement. During a sabbatical a few years ago as I travelled from archive to archive I realized the centrality of Carolee Schneemann to the networks I write about. When I saw the edited collection of her letters, I began to think about ways to exploring them with using digital tools.  My project,Visualizing Schneemann combines many tools including NER (named entity recognition), corpus linguistics, scraping Google Books, and Raw and Gephi.

2. What is one of the most pressing issues in the field of “digital art history” today?

I’m worried about non canonical artists being left behind.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?  

The speakers at “American Art History and Digital Scholarship: New Avenues of Exploration” conference were amazing.  I’m also extremely excited to see what comes out of the Getty Sponsored digital art history summer programs at George Mason and UCLA

Speaker bio: 

I am a associate professor of history at Rosemont College in Philadelphia where I direct the program in Women’s and Gender Studies.

After receiving my doctorate in women’s history from the University of California at Los Angeles, I pursued an alternative academic career for six years, first  as the assistant director of the women’s leadership program at Mount St Mary’s College in Los Angeles, where I also taught women’s studies and history, and then as the Director of the Women’s Center at William Paterson University of New Jersey where I held a joint appointment as an assistant professor of history.

I have published extensively about feminist art and social movements in the United States.  My current project, The Politics of Women’s Culture, takes an intellectual history approach to the idea of women’s culture as it developed among activists, artists and academics in the 1970s. I am particularly interested in the intersections between history and art done publicly. My method of Writing In Public is indebted to the practices of the feminist art activists I study.

I  work in digital history and serve as a Subject Area specialist for NITLEin the areas of transforming the digital humanities and bridging digital divides between large and small institutions of higher education.  I’m serve as the social media guide for Feminist Scholars Digital Writing@Hastac.

I participate in the larger community of digital humanities scholars and teachers through my blog, History in the City, and Twitter.

Nathalie Hager has B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Canadian Art History from Carleton University in Ottawa where she taught art history as a contractual educator at the National Gallery of Canada and the former Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. As a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program at the University of British Columbia she examines the controversial proposal to transform the stable and traditional discipline of art history into World Art History, a “new broad discipline” that extends beyond Europe to be both multidisciplinary and global in approach. Her dissertation evaluates and tests emerging theories of world art history in order to develop strategies to incorporate, emphasize, and strengthen transnational connections and propose theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for introductory curricula.

She’ll be giving a talk titled “Introducing ‘WHAM – World History of Art Mashup,” a presentation-ready, rapid prototype of an interactive web interface for desktop screens and smartphones that reorganizes current-existing high-quality resources for art history into a mashup focused on a ‘networks-of-exchange’ approach. By making explicit the connections between diverse world regions in dynamic exchange with one another, WHAM supports world art history’s emphasis on global and transnational linkages as shapers of human history. Initiated to address the lack of suitable pedagogical texts for introductory art history courses that reflect the current state of the discipline and the rise of World Art History approaches, WHAM presents as an alternative to the traditional introductory art history survey text.