Nancy Ross is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah and a speaker at THATCamp CAA 2014. She led the TICE ART 1010 development team in 2011 and is the Contributing Editor for Medieval Art for Smarthistory at Khan Academy. She blogs about teaching art history at experiementsinarthistory.blogspot.com/.

The working title for her THATCamp presentation is “Students Respond to Teaching Twentieth Century Art History with Gender and Data Visualizations.” In my Twentieth Century Art History class last spring we focused on female artists and created a data visualization on the social networks of female artists. This presentation will highlight the project and student responses to the project.

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Murtha Baca and Anne Helmreich outlined five phases of digital humanities that serve as a model for digital art history. Their work is valuable to me as I try to find my way through research projects that fall within the purview of digital humanities and figure out a research direction for the future. But I think that they miss a key step, which is the teaching of digital art history. And not just to grad students, but to undergrads too. Perhaps especially to undergrads.

Many of our undergrads live in a digital world. When we discuss, learn about, and research art history using social media, online content, and digital tools, we are discussing art history in a way that will make more sense to them than learning out of a traditional textbook, which they may or may not be able to understand. I recently gave a talk at Weber State University where I presented the idea that our traditional textbooks are rendered useless if our students do not have college-level reading skills. I saw a lot of faculty heads nod in agreement. This is the reality that we encounter when we teach at open-admissions institutions. We spend a lot of class time remediating textbook reading assignments, which reduces the amount of time that we spend on other learning activities.

Today, digital textbooks like Smarthistory at Khan Academy can replace traditional ones, especially when we use them in combination with other digital teaching resources, most of which are freely available online. But teaching digital art history isn’t just about replacing a textbook with online content. It’s about creating new narratives in art history and allowing our students to share in that process. If we want to understand the sexist and racist underpinnings of the art history that we’ve learned throughout our careers, practicing digital art history in the classroom will help us get there. There is no better way to stick it to The Man than to text-mine The Man’s writings and reveal his biases.

We don’t have to know how to code to teach digital art history in the undergraduate classroom, as there are plenty of tools out there that we can easily use to demonstrate the principles and benefits of digital art history, whether they are online (perhaps translated) texts, Google image searches, text mining tools, or data visualization tools. We can be as sophisticated as Omeka or as simple as Pinterest when we teach students to collect and analyze art for themselves. Perhaps we may even venture as far as spreadsheets and databases, quantifying and coding, all the while tweeting their process, observations, and questions for fellow students and scholars beyond their classroom.

Digital research/teaching methods help our students develop critical thinking, especially as they encounter and challenge the way that art history is presented to them. Learning digital art history allows students to experiment with constructing their own narratives of art history, fully immersing them in the research process. Our students needed digital art history yesterday.

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, professor of the history of art, has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Maryland. She kindly agreed to reflect on our THATCamp questions.

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

I let statistics gleaned from honorable databases guide me to art historical insights.  The profusion of art historical database material is a major innovation for which to be grateful.  I would like to see a site where privately created research databases could be brought together, enhanced, corrected, made public and shared.

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

Curtailment of ideas and insights owing to less-than-universal open access to visual material for scholarly purposes is the biggest blight on the profession of art history.  The battle against using research material as a profit-making commodity should be ceaseless (and victorious)

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Innovation is happening in the classroom where many new and wonderful technical elements are being manipulated for pedagogical purposes.  Since no one makes programs designed for scholarship and/or teaching, invention’s mother has created remarkable new types of interaction with students.  With any luck, these on-the-fly stimuli will ultimately change the way art history is written.

A.L. McMichael is a PhD candidate in Byzantine art history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a research fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been active in various GC Digital Initiatives—including the New Media Lab and the Digital Fellows program—for several years. She’ll be presenting–alongside Meredith Brown–a lightening talk titled “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing” (more details here).

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

In terms of my personal work, I’m interested in how we convey spaces and rituals to museum-goers and students, how to better merge a study of places with material culture objects. Digital projects can go a long way toward this—3D models, interactive maps and timelines, reconstructions, virtual reality are all being used to great effect. But how do we do this without distracting from the monuments and objects themselves—what’s the right balance?

I’m also excited about the possibilities of incorporating digital elements into art history dissertations in a manageable way. My dissertation is on rock-cut architecture in Byzantine Cappadocia (central Turkey), and I’m creating a digital catalog of monuments as part of it. Another ongoing project, Documenting Cappadocia, is my website on a similar topic, which I’ve used for experimenting with tools, presentation, and information architecture.

In the grander scheme of things, I look forward to the day we drop the “digital” for a more inclusive definition of art history and all its methods.

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

Open access and Linked data! Not only how institutions can make their resources open and connected, but how small projects and individuals (i.e. dissertations) can contribute to public scholarship through networks of likeminded researchers.

Where do you see innovations happening?

I see innovations happening when projects consider sustainability from day one, often with the help of librarians or archivists. All art historians can learn a lot from archaeologists. So many of them are thinking about best practice for recording data, sharing it, working collaboratively, interpreting it for various audiences. Open Context is a good example of this, and a number of other examples are found within ancient and medieval studies, specifically in the Linked Ancient World Data Initiative (LAWDI), wherein participants make a concerted effort to contribute and reuse data in order build interdisciplinary connections.

What’s the panel or issue you’d most like to see proposed for THATCamp CAA in Chicago?

We need to better train art historians (at all levels) to peer review digital projects, hopefully steering credit and funding toward more digital work moving forward.

Renee’s reflections on digital labor make me wonder if this issue can be intertwined with a discussion on how to evaluate digital scholarship.

Liz McDermott is Managing Editor, Web and Communications, at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. She oversees the development, production, and publication of all content on the GRI website and related social media platforms. At THATCamp CAA 2014, she’ll be presenting a lightening talk titled, “Bridging the Gap: Presenting Scholarly Content on Social Media Platforms.” She describes the outline thus: “Recently we pinned a collection of the first photographs of Mayan sites to our Pinterest board and posted an album of pages from German artist Otto Mühl’s sketchbook on our Facebook page. Both resources come from the GRI’s vast Special Collections. Cultivating a social media presence is an opportunity for cultural institutions to disseminate resources and share information on a scale that was unheard of even 10 years ago. We know that outlets like Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are powerful communication tools; our challenge is to develop ways to take traditional, scholarly art-historical content and present it in a way that is professional and rigorously accurate, yet also takes into account the casual, conversational tone that is inherent in social media.”

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

Most of my work relates to digital access and dissemination of resources. Except for a handful of print pieces, everything I do at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) has a digital destination, whether it’s our website or a specific social media application such as YouTube or Facebook. The website contains nearly 8,000 HTML pages that provide access to, or share information about the GRI’s research resources. There are sections about scholarly events (including video documentation of lectures and symposiums) and exhibitions, pages that connect readers to a dozen specialized research databases, sections that provide information on what is contained in our vast Special Collections of archives and rare materials, and digitized books, images, podcasts, and other media. Similarly, we use social media to expand our reach to art historians.

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

There are many complicated and pressing issues, but two of the most fundamental ones are access and training.

Access: A 1937 essay by H.G. Wells, “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia,” imagined a world in which a “Permanent World Encyclopaedia” might “pull the mind of the world together.” Of course, in many ways this has come true through the Internet, with images, photographs, films, and writing available across more than 644 million active websites (as of 2012, according to Business Insider.) Such easy access to human knowledge would seem to be a natural fit for art historians, especially since art history scholarship has traditionally been complicated by the inaccessibility of research materials and especially images. And yet, only a small fraction of art-historical materials are currently available online. Complications with image rights, the need for institutional infrastructure, and the deep resources needed to get material up and online, are huge challenges.

Training: “Teens are (over) confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.” (Hoa Loranger and Jakob Nielson, 2013 reporting on website usability tests conducted with teenagers) Contrary to popular belief, young people are not more facile with technology, and yet somehow this myth persists. Scholars need easy and ongoing access to quality training on using and developing digital tools, and cultural institutions need the resources to properly test and develop these tools.

3.   Where do you see innovations happening?

OSCI, the Online Scholarly Cataloging Initiative, went a long way toward helping museums make the transition from printed volumes to multimedia, web-based publications. Launched by the Getty Foundation in 2009, the initiative supported eight other institutions in the creation of a suite of tools to facilitate the publishing and dissemination of online scholarly catalogues for art history.

4.   What’s the panel or issue you’d most like to see proposed for THATCamp CAA in Chicago?

Increasingly, scholarly work is being done on the web, but is largely unrecognized and undiscovered by undergraduate and graduate students and fellow researchers in the discipline. How can a process be developed for deciding how quality scholarship should be defined (or redefined) in the digital age? Is it possible to develop a scholarly publishing model that applies the best in traditional academic rigor to the digital world?

Meredith A Brown is the Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is co-editor of Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Collaborative Practices in Art, Architecture and Film (2015), a peer-reviewed digital book; her current project is on feminist institution building in Lower Manhattan. She holds a PhD and MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA from Stanford University. She’s going to be presenting at THATCamp alongside A.L. McMichael,  a PhD candidate in Byzantine art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and also a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A.L. has been active in various GC Digital Initiatives—including the New Media Lab and the Digital Fellows program—for several years. Together, they’ll present a lightening talk titled, “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing.”

Their lightening talk description? For early career and emerging scholars in the field of art history, the world of digital publishing is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, it can provide innovative and interactive ways to present research; on the other, digital-only publications tend to be seen as less prestigious, less rigorous, and ultimately less useful for career advancement than more traditional (paper) publishing. In an open discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of online publishing, we will ask how digital writing might allow us to “upcycle” other work–in online journals, blogs, and other formats–to create an online presence around our research, how online academic presses and the peer-review process might improve and legitimate digital publications, and whether such publishing initiatives in our field are worth it.

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Meredith took a few minutes to answer the THATCamp questions:

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

I’m interested in collaboration as a general mode of working in the world and in particular in collaborative methods of research and writing in the humanities. Unsurprisingly, many of the most exciting initiatives around collaboration are happening through digital platforms, and that’s very exciting to me. At the moment I’m working with fellow art historian and THATCamp organizer Michelle Millar Fisher as co-editors of a collaboratively written book about collaborative practices in twentieth century art, architecture and film. Of course it’s going to be a digital publication, produced by Courtauld Books Online! And between now and then the fourteen contributing co-authors are generating a website reflective of our research process that will function as both a digital archive of the project and (hopefully) a future teaching tool.

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

Within my own work with digital publishing, issues of copyright and access are a constant headache; plus, it is still an uphill battle to ensure that genuinely scholarly publications–rigorously peer-reviewed, professionally edited, etc.–that appear as digital-only publications are given equal weight as traditionally published articles and books. This seems to be a particular struggle for early career scholars in the academic job market and tenure process.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

There are a number of institutions that seem like they might be rather old fashioned about things that have been doing really interesting open access digital publishing projects–the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Met, the Courtauld, the Getty, University of California Press…and the list is growing 

4. What’s the panel or issue you’d like to see proposed for THATCamp CAA in Chicago?

I know there are lots of really great things happening at the intersection of education and digital technology, and as I’ve been out of the teaching loop for a couple of years now, I’m really looking forward to learning about digital innovations in the teaching of art history.

Desi Gonzalez is graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a research assistant in HyperStudio. Previously, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art producing educational materials including as wall texts, audio tours, games, interactive learning spaces, and websites. Liam Andrew is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a research assistant in HyperStudio. With a background in literature, music, and software development, he is currently researching the history of information management and recommendation systems. Their presentation at THATCamp CAA is titled, “HyperStudio: Collaborating with Colleague and Cultural Institutions.”

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Collaboration is an important part of our work in HyperStudio, MIT’s laboratory for the digital humanities. We’ll be presenting on a current HyperStudio project, which is a tool that will empower users to discover cultural events, exhibitions, and art objects in the Boston area. After a brief overview of the project, we’ll discuss how we are collaborate internally, with each researcher contributing different skills and knowledge, as well as how we are collaborating with museums to develop an effective tool that best serves their needs and complements existing digital and educational strategies.

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

At HyperStudio, we are investigating how digital tools can encourage discovery and serendipity in the humanities, with a specific focus on art objects and museum collections. We are developing a mobile application or website that will empower user to discover cultural events, exhibitions, and artworks in the Boston area. Instead of creating another listing or image-aggregating website, we’re interested in probing how a new tool could foster meaningful and sustained relationships with art. For example, let’s say you see and are fascinated by the Amy Sillman exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Our tool might then connect you to an animation workshop led by a contemporary artist at the Peabody Essex Museum, inform you about a lecture about feminism and the arts at Harvard, or point you to works in the Museum of Fine Arts collection by other artists who integrate cartoon elements into compositions. While digital media can provide ways to discover art online, our project aims to put people directly in front of works of art.

The principles underlying this new project is a concept that runs through many HyperStudio endeavors. For example, Annotation Studio is an open source web tool that aims to enhance the ways a student interacts with a text. A student can add multimedia annotations onto a text, search and link to other content, and ultimately engage in a more active reading of the text. The digital tool doesn’t overshadow the original text, but is instead an avenue to dig deeper into it. Like Annotation Studio, the goal of our new project is to privilege engagement with the art first.

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

Digital tools purport to democratize cultural heritage, bringing art out of the museum and academy walls and reconnecting the audience to the archive. They bear the promise of making art accessible to new kinds of audiences, forming a dialogue between the present and our cultural past. But online everyone is a curator, whether they know it or not; automatic recommendation systems look to users to filter their content. Where does that leave the role of the professional curator online? Are there ways to harness both expertise and collective taste, both online and in museums? How can digital tools encourage meaningful dialogue when these two signals are at odds?

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

More and more museums are opening up collection data and high resolution images of objects to the public. Institutions that are leading the charge in this impulse include the Cooper-Hewitt, the Rijksmuseum, and most recently, the Tate. By sharing collection data, museums serve as an important resource and encourage artists, researchers, and the public to create their own meaning out of the data. Some amazing data visualizations have resulted: Seattle-based astronomer Jim Davenport graphed works in the Tate collection by height and width, finding that the dimensions of the majority of objects approximated the Golden Ratio. The Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands recently invited Dutch designer Joost Grootens to create infographics based on the museum’s collection data. Installed in the collection galleries, these visualizations—probing questions like “Which works have traveled the most and to where?”—provide visitors new and exciting ways to consider the collection.

4. What’s the panel or issue you’d most like to see proposed for THATCamp CAA in Chicago?

We’re interested in discussing how scholars and museums can work together to build tools that benefit both parties. What projects have museums undertaken to make their collections useful for researchers? What new insights are coming from these collaborations? What makes such a collaboration effective?

The Getty Foundation is funding three separate institutes. All of these offer stipends covering travel and housing:

• June 16–June 27, 2014: Beautiful Data at Harvard’s metaLAB. “Participants will be exposed to the core concepts, skills and practices necessary to make imaginative use of open collections data and assets, and to develop new forms of art-historical argument and storytelling that involve visualization, interactive media, expanded definitions of curatorial description, and hybrid analog/digital approaches to exhibition design and teaching.” (Applications open now)
• July 7–18, 2014: Digital Humanities for Art Historians at George Mason University. “‘Digital Humanities for Art Historians’ will target art historians, from graduate students, to mid-career and senior scholars, from varied backgrounds, including faculty, curators, and established art librarians and archivists who are eager to move more deeply into the digital turn in the humanities.” (Applications open soon – you can sign up for notifications here)
• July 28–August 6, 2014: Beyond the Digitized Slide Library at UCLA. “Participants will learn about debates and key concepts in the digital humanities and gain hands-on experience with tools and techniques for art historical research (including metadata basics, data visualization, network graphs, and digital mapping).” (Applications open now, due March 1st. Note: open to faculty/staff only, no current graduate students)

The Kress Foundation is sponsoring one institute. Fellowships pay for tuition, room, board, and provide a travel stipend for all participants:

• August 3–15, 2014: Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History at Middlebury: “Co-directed by Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University) and Anne Kelly Knowles (Middlebury College), the Summer Institute will emphasize how digital mapping of art historical evidence can open up new veins of research in art history as a whole.” (Applications open now, due March 3, 2014)

Several people have also written in about the “Visualizing Venice” summer workshop:

• June 3–13, 2014: Visualizing Venice: the City and the Lagoon: “Participants will use the city and the lagoon as a ‘laboratory’ through which to examine questions such as change over time and dynamic process in urban and rural environments, showing how man-made spaces respond to social and economic process and transformation. The aim of the workshop is to train scholars in how new technologies can be integrated with the study of historical and material culture. The workshop will focus on a range of visualization tools that can be used in a wide variety of research areas, in particular modeling change over time in urban space and the production of maps and low-cost photogrammetry.”

Digital tools enable visitors, and art historians, to pursue a widening web of connections. In the Getty Center galleries with Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul, about 1330, Bernardo Daddi. Tempera and gold leaf on panel, 47 1/2 x 22 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 93.PB.16

We’re really excited that James Cuno has joined the THATCamp CAA 2014 conversation, kindly responding to our invitation to author a blog post here (this essay will also be published in The Getty Iris). Cuno is president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. An art historian by training, he’s been a professor and director at several other arts institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Harvard University Art Museums; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA; and Vassar College. Here he offers a kickstarter to the discussions and debates we hope will happen at THATCamp CAA 2014 in Chicago in a few short weeks.

Art museums, research centers, and libraries are central locations for the work of art history. For those of us who work in these institutions, the question of whether to embrace digital technology has long been answered, with a resounding yes. The Getty and our sister institutions around the world are digitizing collections, making content open, publishing online, using linked open data, engaging digitally with audiences, and using technology to help advance conservation and conservation studies, among many other initiatives.

As a single example, last March 7,000 volumes in the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute had been digitized. Today it’s 13,159. The challenge we face now is to recognize the new possibilities ushered in by this critical mass of digitization, and to effectively meet them as institutions and individuals.

In museums, we’ve already seen first-hand how new digital technology, protocols, and platforms can enhance visitors’ experience. At their most basic, digital tools provide an efficient conduit for information—on individual works of art and artists, exhibition themes, and public programming. But digital also gives visitors new agency in their engagement with art. High-resolution images allow the discovery of the tiniest detail. Technical images capture objects under infrared light and X-ray. 3-D objects can be digitally manipulated, and artworks from far-flung collections can be compared side by side.

It’s true that in museums we’ve often heard the concern that digital tools will distract visitors and students from genuine encounters with works of art. I believe the opposite is more often true: that digital tools enable people to direct their own learning, formulate new questions, and find unexpected connections, the raw material of intellectual discovery.

Say a visitor is at the Getty Museum looking at Bernado Daddi’s Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul and is intrigued by the punch work around the Virgin’s head. On her phone or tablet she searches for other Daddi paintings and finds one in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence with very similar punch work. This leads her to search for more information on the Duomo, then 14^th-century  Florence, then other places in the world where Daddi paintings hang. Even if this visitor never returns to her incipient Daddi studies, she has built a mental portrait that stays with her, and may be reactivated years later when she finds herself in Edinburgh looking at Daddi’s Tryptych with the Crucifixion…and there’s that punch again. Digital enables a web of connections that are the raw material of intellectual discovery for a casual visitor, a student, or an art historian.

Punch work (designs punched into gold) was used in late-medieval
Italian painting to adorn haloes. Left: Madonna, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Paul (detail), about 1330, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Center: St Catherine of Alexandria with Donor and Christ Blessing (detail),
about 1340, Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze.
Right: The Coronation of the Virgin (detail), about 1340-45, the National Gallery, London

We are at a turning point in digital art history. Now that so much primary material has been digitized by collecting institutions around the world—artworks, archives, and texts of scholarship—forward-looking art historians are teaming with technologists to forge tools with this digitized material, tools that go beyond access or documentation to create new ways of working and publishing.

This is a goal of the Getty’s Digital Mellini project, a tool to study and interpret a 17^th-century manuscript collaboratively online. (Make sure to catch the lightning talk on this and its umbrella project, the Getty Scholars’ Workspace™, on Tuesday at 3:45pm by Francesca Albrezzi and Tom Scutt of the Getty Research Institute [GRI]). Under the guidance of Murtha Baca, head of digital art history at the GRI, Digital Mellini will soon culminate in a born-digital scholarly publication including a flippable, zoomable facsimile of the heretofore unpublished manuscript, one that could never exist as a physical book. It has no beginning, middle, or end. It upends established models of authorship. Most of all, the publication is both a work of scholarship and a work for scholarship.

Murtha’s team recently invited a group of art historians to user-test a prototype of this forthcoming publication. Again and again, they heard that tools like the Scholars’ Workspace can prove critical for planning and structuring inquiry, making work with primary materials more productive. “It helps me be a more efficient researcher to see the manuscript first online,” said one participant. “I don’t waste a lot of time in special collections.”

We also heard about the immense value of teaching with digital tools such as the Scholars’ Workspace, which enable scholars to enhance the digital surrogate with deep context and connections. “Most undergrads don’t have access to historical documents,” said a scholar. “This is a great way to give them primary resources to work with and yet [keep them from being] totally lost.” In fact, the tool proved so useful, some scholars almost felt guilty. “It does the work for you,” one exclaimed. “It almost feels like cheating!”

As digitization reaches critical mass and we can do more as digital art historians, what should we do? I look forward to hearing what the participants at THATCamp think is digital art history’s next, most pressing more.

Thanks to my colleagues Anne Helmreich, Murtha Baca, and Susan Edwards for input into this essay.

Our press release is live…… See the schedule here and get proposing here!

“Histories of art and visual arts practices are now–and will be in their future iterations–inextricably interwoven with the digital.  What does this mean for our scholarship, innovation, research, knowledge production, and teaching?  Join the conversation, discussion, and exchange of ideas on the digital + art + histories at THATCamp (The Technology and Humanities Camp) at CAA 2014.

Because THATCamp is an unconference, the agenda will be decided through discussion in the conference participant community.  Attendees brainstorm online before the conference dates through blog posts, and propose sessions in advance.  The agenda will be set collaboratively in the first hour of the event on Monday, February 10.  In this way, all THATCamp CAA 2014 attendees are active participants in setting the program, and proposing, leading, and documenting sessions.  We strongly encourage involvement in the process via the Proposals page on the THATCamp CAA 2014 website.

We are pleased to announce that, in addition to the agenda decided on the day, there are a number of invited presenters who will engage the THATCamp CAA 2014 community in participatory and reflective discussions and workshops.

Piotr Adamczyk, Program Manager, Google Cultural Institute (will participate via Google Hangout) // “What’s Google up to? … and is there a catch? The Open Gallery Project”

JiaJia Fei, Digital Marketing Manager, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY // “The Museum & Social Media”

Amanda French, National THATCamp Coordinator, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, VA // Omeka Workshop

Charlotte Frost, Visiting Assistant Professor of contemporary/digital art histories and digital literacies at City University of Hong Kong // Digital Publishing workshop

Dene Griger, Creative Media and Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver // “Participatory apps and founding a digital publishing house to publish digital artist’s books”

Kevin Hamilton, Associate Professor, New Media Program, School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois and students Jessica Landau and Melissa Seifert // “Learning to See Systems: addressing the role of vision in new technologies”

Liz McDermott, Managing Editor, Getty Research Institute Web and Communications // “Bridging the Gap: Presenting Scholarly Content on Social Media Platforms”

Renee McGarry, Senior instructional designer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York // “Beyond Tools and Tips: Manifestos about Teaching Digitally”

Michelle Moravec, Associate Professor, Rosemont College // “Visualizing Schneemann explores the production of histories of art using multiple digital tools”

Nancy Ross, Assistant Professor of Art History at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah // “Students Respond to Teaching Twentieth Century Art History with Gender and Data Visualizations”

ArtAndFeminism Wikipedia Meetup/Chicago // Wiki Workshop & live edit-a-thon led by Jacqueline Mabey (The office of failed projects, New York) Siân Evans (Coordinator of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLiS/NA)’s Women and Art Special Interest Group), Melanie Emerson, (Head of Reader Services at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago), Holly Stec Dankert (Head of Research and Access Services at the John M. Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Prof. Michael Mandiberg (Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center) and Amy Ballmer, (Art Librarian, The CUNY Graduate Center Mina Rees Library).

THATCamp CAA 2014 is pleased to announce the support of emerging voices in the field of digital art history.  This year, THATCamp CAA 2014 has committed to providing a platform for early-career scholars and students in the field of digital art history.  The participants below will join the roster of confirmed THATCamp speakers, and will lead discussions around key themes, ideas, and practical applications in the broad field of digital art history.

Francesca Albrezzi, University of California, Los Angeles and Tom Scutt, Getty Research Institute) // “Getty Scholars’ Workspace: Developing tools, methods, and standards for conducting and publishing original research in digital form”

Desi Gonzalez and Liam Andrew, MIT // “HyperStudio: Collaborating with Colleague and Cultural Institutions”

Meredith A. Brown, Metropolitan Museum of Art and A.L. McMichael, The Graduate Center, CUNY // “Upcycling:” Building a Professional Online Presence Through Digital Publishing”

Nathalie Hager, University of British Columbia // “Case Study on WHAM – World History of Art Mashup”

Tara Zepel, University of California, San Diego // “Visualization in digital art history”

The participants listed above have been identified as THATCamp CAA 2014 Kress Fellows with costs related to their attendance defrayed by generous support from the Kress Foundation.  Their presence at THATCamp CAA 2014 will encourage dialogue around the mutually beneficial and fruitful connections between “old” and “new” art histories, “traditional” and “avant garde” digital tools, and working practices between students, emerging scholars and professionals, and senior scholars and professionals in the visual arts disciplines.  Head over to the THATCamp CAA 2014 blog to find out more about their upcoming presentation topics and research interests.

Logistics

Following the successful realization of the inaugural THATCamp CAA at the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in New York in February 2013, the second THATCamp CAA 2014 will take place Monday, February 10 (11.45am – 5.15pm) and Tuesday, February 11 (9.30am – 5pm), 2014 at Columbia College Chicago (the days immediately preceding the CAA 2014 annual conference). There will be a follow up “reflection” session on Thursday, February 13 (9.30am – noon) at the Chicago Hilton, the CAA conference hotel in the Marquette room (3rd floor).

All THATCamps are free to register for and free to attend, but space is limited and filling up fast. Further information can be found on the THATCamp CAA 2014 website: caa2014.thatcamp.org.

THATCamp CAA 2014 is organized by Anne Swartz and Michelle Millar Fisher.  The advisory board includes Suzanne Preston Blier, Pamela M. Fletcher, Hussein Keshani, Elizabeth Neely, and Christine L. Sundt.

For further information, please contact THATCamp CAA Project Manager Michelle Millar Fisher: michellemillarfisher [at] gmail [dot] com.”

You can read Diane M. Zorich’s recent study on the status of art history and digital scholarship and teaching (“Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship”) here and engage via Twitter here: @dzorich. We at THATCamp 2014 were big fans of what Diane had to say at THATCamp 2013 last year, and so we’re really excited that she agreed to write the following post for us. It’s perfect timing, as the full list of speakers for THATCamp 2014 went up today (find it here) and we’re kicking off the one-month count down to the big event with the opening of the proposals page – get involved! If you’re registered to come to THATCamp, then it’s your duty to – you’re expected to propose a session.

Those who are coming – here’s Diane’s advice for getting the most out of your THATCamp experience:

THATcamp is a rare opportunity to explore the interplay between the digital world and your research interests.  It’s a break in the grind, a gift of unscheduled exploration. It’s also a chance to explore without the discomfort you may feel from colleagues who are less-than-supportive about digital scholarship. Attendees at THATcamp do not need to be swayed.  They start from a baseline belief that the digital realm offers opportunities to enrich their research, teaching, writing and publishing.  These are your people.

With 2014 upon us, and CAA’s THATCamp just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about ways to maximize the opportunity offered by THATCamp. I have several THATCamps under my belt (including last year’s CAA event) and now have a feel for the flexibility and flow of these events. For what it’s worth, here are my suggestions to first-timers and veterans alike.

1. Plan ahead

I know that seems antithetical to THATCamp, whose “unconference” format eschews the conventions of traditional conference planning.  But if you don’t spend some time thinking about what you want to explore at this event, you’ll wind up tagging along on the interests of others.  My worst THATcamp experience occurred when I attended as a “blank canvas,” hoping to be guided by the session ideas of other attendees.  Being a bystander at THATCamp is like being in a tour group:  you see the sites, but you miss the experiences.

Everyone has their own ways of planning for these events.  I usually ask two questions:  “What do I need or want to know?” and “What digital scholarship have I come across in the past year that I found inspirational (and why?)”.   The answers to these questions usually provide me with plenty of idea fodder.

2. Experiment

When you are trained to think carefully, to do a slow reading of works, and to observe intently, it is hard to pivot toward the fast-paced, uncertain, and prone-to-failure world of experimentation. But experimentation is helpful for revealing useful research pursuits, identifying where to expend resources, and, perhaps most importantly, expanding one’s breadth of experience. My best THATcamp experiences occurred when I tried something new and completely outside my skill set and work routine.

So when I plan for a THATCamp, I also think about things I would like tinker with that (a) I don’t have time for during the routine of my work life and (b) I don’t have enough experience with to know where to start.  With these parameters in mind, here’s my latest wish list:

• Visualization.  I’d love to take part in a session that allows participants to experiment with various visualizations of their data (using current online visualization tools and little to no programming).  Participants could bring their own datasets to play with, or datasets from open access databases could be provided for those who did not have a research dataset.  By the end of the session, participants will have experimented with different types of visualizations on their dataset, used different visualization tools, and maybe, if lucky, have even discerned new patterns or insights from their visualizations that they can explore further.

• Data wrangling/scrubbing tools.  I’m interested in a tutorial that uses out-of-the-box (and free) tools that help clean, manipulate, gather, extract and otherwise prepare data (e.g. Google Open Refine, Wget, using your operating system command line, etc.) Again, participants could bring their own datasets to play with, or use datasets from open access databases.

3. Build something

One of the highlights of last year’s CAA THATCamp was the creation of an adhoc online art history textbook.  Pulled together in one day by a group of art historians, it proved to be a very successful “proof of concept”, demonstrating the ease of developing such a resource (even for individuals with very limited digital skills) and the value of this type of resource for teaching and course development.  It was a modest effort that showed great potential.

What tool or resource might make your research, teaching, or writing life more fruitful? If you can, crystallize your idea into a small and manageable use case, tool, or other application that you can develop over the course of a day.  If you have a hard time coming up with an appropriate “small build”, just propose your idea as a session and work with those who join in to turn your idea into something concrete.

In this spirit of “building,” my current wish for a CAA or related THATCamp is a session or workshop on “coding for art historians” that introduces coding within the context of an art historical context, application, tool, or function, etc. [In other words, don’t teach me how to code “Hello World!”[1]  Teach me how to code something that is relevant to my use of art historical images and data.]

These “plan/experiment/build” suggestions offer a hands-on approach to complement the guest speakers and theoretical discussions that often make up part of THATCamp agendas.  Learning from the wisdom of others, as well as working directly on something with others, makes for potent formula.  Indeed, several attendees at last year’s CAA THATCamp reported that the event was one of the most energizing experiences of their professional lives.

If you are a THATCamp veteran, what advice do you have to offer for optimizing the experience?  Please add your suggestions in the comments section below.