Starting with an analyst position at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Data Lead for the Google Art Project, and now on the Content Team of the Google Cultural Institute, Piotr Adamczyk’s work is focused on the use of open/linked data in cultural heritage institutions. Piotr has a background a little different than many who will attend CAA’s THATCamp –  undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and graduate degrees in Human Factors and Library and Information Science. He’s authored papers, organized workshops, and served as a Program Committee member for the Association for Computing Machinery and cultural heritage conferences, and his arts research includes residencies at the Banff New Media Institute, Medialab-Prado, and Eyebeam.

He’ll join us at THATCamp to discuss: “What’s Google up to? A quick overview of all of the Google Culture Institute initiatives available to artists, galleries, libraries, archives, museums – large and small. What technology, support, storage, hardware, and tools are available … and is there a catch?” Take a sneak peek at Google’s new Open Gallery project here.

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

   Providing a platform for digitized collections. The Google Cultural Institute partners with non-profit institutions (380+) to host copyright-free or copyright-cleared content at no cost with no transfer of rights and provides the same publishing tools for use by anyone on their own websites. For non-profit institutions, we also provide Street View of their public galleries along with a very high resolution photograph of one object from their collection.

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

   Publication. Everyone involved is grappling with the (perfect) process and the longer we take to create an environment (good-enough) where compelling scholarship can be produced, distributed, and found by academic and broader audiences, the longer we’re stuck arguing about relevance and identity rather than making new work.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

   Among institutions, most innovative work seems to be coming from the midsize. Too small and they’re worried about staying afloat. Too large and they too often tackle technical problems for which they have great ideas but develop solutions that can’t be replicated by others. The midsize, those with just enough staff or resources (even in one department – education, tech, publications) to think beyond their day-to-day tasks, are finding compelling solutions to the problems faced by all.

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

   Preparing materials for departments, colleges, and universities to help them understand digital art history scholarship — all in the service of improving scholarly recognition and tenure cases for faculty willing to experiment.

Happy New Year! The organizers of THATCamp 2014 hope you had a restful holiday. We’re getting excited that THATCamp is just over one month away. We’ll be releasing the list of confirmed speakers and requesting session proposals over the next few days. Here on the blog, we’ll be asking confirmed speakers and participants to get involved in the pre-unconference discussion. First up: Tara Zepel.

Tara is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her current research focuses on the social and cultural ‘situatedness’ of visualization. She is also a dedicated teacher, a member of the Software Studies Lab, and HASTAC Scholar. Her unconference presentation will look at the role of visualization in digital art history and, more broadly, the digital humanities. Using the free software ImagePlot and UCLA’s Hypercities project as key examples, she’ll invite discussion on whether visualization is best characterized as a tool, a method/process, or something else? In doing so, she hopes to encourage conversation about new ways of knowing, thinking and communicating cultural scholarship.

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

My current involvement with digital art history is a bit scattered. I am PhD candidate in Art History, at the University of California, San Diego writing a dissertation on the social and cultural ‘situatedness’ of data visualization. I have worked as a member of the Software Studies Lab to create a number of visualization projects and a free software tool ImagePlot, which visualizes collections of images and video of any size.  I spend a lot of time thinking about the interdisciplinary nature of art. And I’ve organized a HASTAC forum on Visualization Across Disciplines.

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

The funny thing is, I don’t feel much like an art historian; and I would guess that many of the people attending this conference might feel the same way (at least some of the time). This is, I think, one of the most pressing issues in our field. How do we define who is an art historian? Who has access to cultural material? What counts as art historical scholarship? The answers to such questions are in flux and rather large in scope. Yet, it is just as important to take time to reflect upon them and modify them as the tools and technology we use. Like beta version software, they may also need to be tweaked depending on field-wide goals and needs.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Innovation happens in collaboration. I think this is one of the fundamental ideas of digital art history. The question is collaboration between what? Or whom? Often, the answer is between art historical scholarship and new technology or tools. But we can also consider the innovation that results from art historians collaborating with new social practices or institutions, new forms of media, or even viewers. Each of these collaborations leads to different types of innovation within the field. I also think it is important to consider innovation in the other direction – that is digital art historical scholarship has or might affect technological development and other disciplinary fields.

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

I’m going to have to echo Christine Sundt’s answer to this question: “Rethinking methods courses for students of art history. What should students know and when should they know it?” How we teach art history and what constitutes literacy in the field are key issues to think about as digital art history continues to develop.

Find the recordings of sessions from the recent conference, “American Art History and Digital Scholarship,” here. With sessions on mapping images, networks and contexts, curating online, and publishing online, it’s important viewing for THATCamp attendees!

Nina Simon designs and researches participatory museum experiences. She’s the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and author of The Participatory Museum. Her blog, Museum 2.0, explores ways that web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design. A recent post on her blog caught our eye. Where are the most interesting confluences of big data + museums/collections + art happening? 

Detail on distribution of artworks in the Tate collection by birthdate of artists, visualized by Florian Krautli. What does “big data” look like for museums? Collecting institutions have enormous stacks of data about the artifacts and artworks in their stores. Several museums around the world have worked hard to make their data accessible by providing free access to datasets, applying Creative Commons licenses to digital content, or creating APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow programmers to build their own software on the museum’s data. Last month, the Tate joined the party when they opened up their collection database to the world on GitHub, a website where programmers collaborate on projects. The Tate is providing metadata about artworks and artists in its collection–over 70,000 artworks in all. The data is in a computer language called .JSON that is commonly used for data sharing and processing. Even if you don’t speak database, it’s worth seeing how the Tate is presenting their collection to programmers on GitHub. What can you do with these .JSON files? Anyone can pull down the data and use it for their own purposes, subject to some simple goodwill guidelines. Here are two examples of visualizations created by GitHub users: Florian Krautli, a Swiss designer living in London, graphed the volume of artworks by individual artists in the Tate’s collection over time. Jim Davenport, an astronomer living in Seattle, charted the height and width of all of the works in the Tate’s collection. These visualizations are fun. They are beautiful. They raise interesting questions about the Tate’s collection and the imperfections of collections data. But the discussions they raise are limited. Florian’s blog post centers on the question of why there are so many pieces by William Turner in the Tate’s collection. A commenter pointed out that there must be an error in the data, as it is highly unlikely that Turner produced more than 40,000 works in his lifetime. Jim’s post suggests some fun but somewhat silly conclusions about the height/width ratio of artworks.Reading these posts and the related conversations, I was struck by two conflicting feelings: It’s awesome that data-sharing is causing people to have a conversation about what artists are represented in a museum collection, what kind of artwork the Tate has, what surprising things can be visualized and learned from the collections data, and how the data can be improved. The data is sufficiently flawed and idiosyncratic to yield conclusions of questionable value. Knowing the dimensions of the frame a painting is in is much less compelling than many, many other things that could be known and explored about works of art. I’m imagining visualizations focusing on the gender or race of artists in the collection, frequency of loans (and to whom), frequency of display, common words used in label text… the list goes on. To me, the fact that #1 is exciting and promising makes addressing #2 worth it. Opening up data is just the first (big) step to make it usable and useful. These experiments prompt questions, identify gaps in the data, and promote new forms of collection, dissemination, and analysis. The data you have is not always the data you want, but you often don’t know that until you start monkeying with it. Future iterations of data sharing and use will help institutions and citizen-participants take the next steps to make it meaningful. This post originally appeared on the Museum 2.0 site on 27 Nov 2013. Thanks to Nina Simon for allowing the cross-post here.

Renee McGarry is the senior instructional designer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. (All views expressed here are her own.) She also participated in THATCamp CAA 2013, and was willing to answer our four broad questions on the state of “digital art histories” today, as she sees it.

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

My involvement with digital art history currently feels really scattered, particularly because I’ve found it difficulty to settle in a community of scholars and teachers. My current position at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art affords me a lot of time to think about digital pedagogy, and I enjoy doing so largely by working with faculty to add digital tools and projects to their in-person and online classrooms.
I was really lucky to be involved with the launch of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in 2006-2007, as I initially worked on creating entries for the exhibition’s wiki. This was really my first exposure to the concept of a wiki and while I am not sure the whole wiki project itself was successful, I think it was a great initial foray into the field of what we’re now calling digital art history. Since then I’ve started working on a digital companion to my dissertation which will allow it to be read in a non-linear fashion, much closer to the ways in which Mesoamericans read manuscripts than the traditional book format. There are a couple of other projects I have on the back burner that involve crowdsourcing and working with digital tools that I hope can come to fruition really soon.

I also with with Ananda Cohen Suarez, assistant professor of colonial Latin American visual culture at Cornell, to maintain a blog, Latin America Visualized. (Of course, this brings up the question of whether or not blogging “counts” as digital scholarship, since I’ve seen plenty of people argue that it doesn’t!)  This project has allowed me really to think about the question of audience when it comes to the internet, something that I discussed at a CAA 2013 session in tandem with a paper presented by Dr. Charlotte Frost as well (especially in reference to Twitter, and I chose to open this paper up to edits while I presented it).

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

Goodness, what AREN’T the most pressing issues in the field of digital art history! Part of me wants to just make a list: creating community, scholars learning to collaborate, scholars learning to be kinder to each other about works in progress, scholars thinking about presenting works in progress, teachers thinking about how to bring digital research and tools into the classroom, open access, open access, open access, the gendering of our labor, and, finally, something that’s become a bit of a pet rant of mine lately, digital labor. I want to focus on the last two, as I think they are the least discussed (unless it’s specifically in reference to whether or not something counts for tenure, a conversation I’d really like to see change). Teachers and scholars MUST start documenting the time and efforts that go into the labor of creating open educational resources, digital scholarly projects, online textbooks, and whatever else they are doing. Right now so many (hell, most!) of us are doing this for free! And while it’s nice to be all lovey and sharey about things, our work has to be documented or we (especially graduate students, junior faculty, and other contingent academic workers) will keep having to do it for free. In fact, it will become another expectation, another line on the CV that MUST be there! Do we really need to add another one of those to an everchanging and shrinking academic job market? I’d like to see people continue on with their work but really force this conversation.

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Museums and open access. I’ve been really excited about the developments coming out of a number of institutions lately, and I hope to see it continue, and, then of course, broaden into conversations about what we do with the images and resources now that we have them.

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

Building scholarly community, what that means, and how we do it in (digital) art history. Do we rely on institutions like CAA, and when they don’t provide a means to build community how do we do it without them? I often feel incredibly isolated, and I recognize that I am actually very connected! It’s also nice to have a way to get started in digital art history that isn’t just on your own, something to think about too!

Pamela M. Fletcher is Professor of Art History & Chair of Department & Co-Director of the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, Bowdoin College, and one of the organizers of THATCamp CAA 2014.

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

I first became interested in digital art history methods as a way of figuring out when and where the commercial art gallery originated in London. That research question led to the London Gallery Project, which my co-author David Israel and I completed in 2007 but didn’t publish until Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide launched their “Digital Humanities and Art History” series in 2012. That opportunity to think through the larger questions raised by digital methods in the study of the art market, in collaboration with Anne Helmreich, really sparked my thinking and led directly to my involvement in Bowdoin’s new curricular initiative in Digital and Computational Studies. As part of that program, I am planning on teaching a senior seminar on Digital Art History at Bowdoin in 2014-15. I’m really looking forward to THATCamp CAA 2014 as an opportunity to gather ideas for that course.

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

What level of computational literacy is necessary for art historians to take up serious digital scholarship? How will we develop that expertise? How will we teach it to our students – at what levels and in what contexts?

3. Where do you see innovations happening?

Well, that depends what kind of innovation you mean! I think that technological innovation is still happening primarily outside art history, and that we need to be talking to computer scientists and other people with computational expertise as they design and build new tools. And some of us will need or want to develop that expertise ourselves. The innovations within art history are of a different order, as scholars begin to rethink the kinds of questions (and the scale of questions) they can ask, and realize that collaboration – with computer scientists, designers, and other art historians – is a fundamental part of digital scholarship. This fact challenges many of our assumptions about how art historians (and other humanists) work and how their work is published and evaluated, and is one of the most exciting and challenging innovations I see the digital world bringing to the discipline.

Alex Gil at is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Columbia University Libraries.

He participated in THATCamp 2013 and we asked him to reflect on the four questions we’ve been posing to other posters who attended last year, or will attend in Chicago in 2014. He suggested, instead, offering his thoughts on the panel he was due to participate in (ultimately foiled due to transportation woes) at the recent American Studies Association conference, “Digital Humanities and the Neoliberal University: Complicity and/or Resistance.” 

**

The jury is still out on the role that the digital humanities can play in redressing some troubling trends in Higher Ed in the United States. I side with those voices that warn against placing too much responsibility on what remains an ill-equipped band of hackers and hucksters, for what remain at the core structural and historical woes that require political, financial and cultural redress at scale. The first question I pose myself then is not what can DH do, but why is DH being called upon?

For those who don’t understand and stand to benefit, the main attractor is the word “digital,” no doubt an empty vortex collecting sound and fury, the center of a predictable hurricane. To those who begin to know and want to play, our importance derives from the knowledge of institutions, intellectual property, publishing platforms, networks and computation that inevitably accrues the more you spend time doing DH. In other words, the digital humanities seem to generate awareness and can-do that seem absent from business as usual, and perhaps could save the day. This misleads some to believe that we can provide or promise the conditions for full employment. Again, these are problems best addressed at other scales, through other registers.

To those who do know, a couple of hacker-sized efforts seem a better fit: the construction of viable models for scholarly research and learning that move us away from the stranglehold of closed-access, print based publication; a revised, humanities-centered curriculum for graduate and undergraduate education, offering added possibilities to participate in the professional and academic middle class; sustainable oversight over the remediation of our material inheritance; a micro-cultural shift in the humanities from representative to participatory democratic collaboration, i.e. the death of the Genius; finally, and perhaps least urgent, a reconciliation between procedural thinking, arts & crafts and the critical enterprise.

The question of our collusion with that nasty neoliberalism comes from some unfortunate consequences of the efforts above—some unforeseen, some avoidable. That said, for the most part, we all find it hard to disentangle the complicit from the resistant; some of us even refuse to use the word neoliberal any more. As Dennis Tenen pointed out to me during the MLA 2013 panel, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” all panelists were wearing Microsoft Research lanyards while they talked of DH complicity with neoliberalism. Complicit much? If not, what then? Is it crowdsourcing? Is it the use of computers with blood on the production line? Is it our energy consumption? Is it Twitter? Is it unpaid interns? Credential-creep? Is it that espresso macchiato we had with the provost?  Is it race? Gender? Citizenship? The prevalent euro-centric canons?  MOOCs (that’s not us, by the way)? Is it doing while talking?

All these questions are receiving attention as time and talent allows, and as all human endeavor paving roads to hell with their good intentions…

I digress. What I meant to say is that within what is being done in the name of a humanities turned digital much activity can have unintended consequences. Who would disagree with that? Isn’t the answer to remain vigilant and respond with alternatives? I will just use one semi-comic example to illustrate my point: The production of expensive, gargantuan digital humanities projects funded by soft money for the glory of a faculty member who couldn’t open a terminal on their overpriced Mac if their tenure depended on it.  Such projects usually tend to hire either a contingent labor force or existing library developers whose role is reemphasized as that of staff, when in reality their contribution shapes the epistemological core of the project. These boutique projects tend to create more problems than they solve, not the least of which are problems of missed opportunities.

I am not opposed to large projects per se, just the ones that are imagined as mono-credit juggernauts. Undoubtedly, several layers of the administration, both in libraries and schools, benefit from such projects, but the knowledge and labor ecologies that we would prefer are sidestepped. Coincidentally, these projects become large burdens to sustain over a period of time, and make us wonder about the return for investment. A large project can, though, serve a more salutary purpose, if for example, instead of having those who can build it, have those who can’t learn how to; If we raise the status and financial well-being of those who can teach the digital in the digital humanities by hiring them permanently and gainfully as integral parts of the university; If the project is built as an addition to an existing community-loved platform, or as a new platform; If we make it well worth the students’ efforts by also paying them to participate. I have seen such models succeed first hand.

These are just some preliminary thoughts considering the question at hand is one of justice, the object of infinite desire. Coming from me, they will always be preliminary. I refuse to address all problems at once, and choose tactics over impotence. Call it an ethics of the Robin Hood in times of greed and subservient reason.

Alex Gil at is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Columbia University Libraries. He’s also Affiliate Faculty in the Columbia University English and Comparative Literature and Vice-Chair, Global Outlook::Digital Humanities. This was cross-posted on Alex’s own website here.

CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D Candidate Andrianna Campbell attended the American Art and Digital Scholarship Conference at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, held last week (November 15-16, 2013). It seemed like a meeting of minds that would produce discussion and collaboration that would chime well with the aims of THATCamp at CAA 2014. We asked her to reflect on the same questions we’ve been posing to our other posters, and on the conference itself. 

My involvement with digital art history currently involves the use of pedagogical tools for my classes at Parsons The New School of Design, an e-book about collaborative practice to which I am co-contributing a chapter and a curatorial project, Decenter, which began at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center in New York and has now traveled to the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University in Washington DC. The latter demanded rigorous participation from me and Daniel Palmer, my co-curator.

In Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show, we proposed an atemporal comparison of abstraction in 1913 and abstraction today. Much abstraction today is mediated through digital technology. The exhibition took place in the gallery (off-line) and decenterarmory.com (on-line) and expanded to include over 500 participants. Because of this exhibit, I was invited by the Archives of American Art (AAA) to attend their American Art and Digital Scholarship symposium held on November 15 and participate in the accompanying workshop on November 16. As we know, the AAA and other Smithsonian Institutions have been in the throes of a widespread and rapid digitalization campaign; their main concern has been the use of digital tools as a means for searching, organizing and archiving information. As a retrieval tool, the Internet is certainly without parallel but the aim of these two gatherings was to move beyond these fundamental concerns. By sharing new digital methodologies for examining data, mapping and visualizing material, scholars/practitioners illuminated their current and future impact on academic research, curatorial projects and pedagogical prospects and thus their transformative influence on the study of American Art.

Digital visualization informed all of the papers at the AAA Symposium. There is something about manifesting abstract data into something seen that has been at the forefront of other disciplinary practice, but has only recently been a burgeoning aspect of research in the humanities. For example, Laura Wexler and Lauren Tilton presented “Revisioning the Archive: The Photogrammar Project” in which they use the catalog of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn et al to create a diagrammatic map, which can be searched temporally, thematically, geographically and incorporates historical census data for a richer understanding of the period. During the workshop, Wexler elaborated on her view of the project as a means to overcome the “digital divide,” a term that she uses to problematize the high-tech gaps seen in users from different social classes or male and female contributors. She points out that young lower-class male voices are well represented online, but less so for educated females, who make up less than 15% of contributors to Wikipedia.

In my own research, I call attention to this as an instance of “historical erasure” that is so common when we maintain similar patriarchal narratives on the Internet as we previously did offline and repost the equivalent information as if it were new. The “digital divide” or “historical erasure” is a major concern of my analysis of the archive. One of the works from Decenter is Andrea Geyer’s Indelible, which shows the names of 9 of the 50 women who were originally featured in the 1913 Armory show, but do not make it into the canonical history of that exhibition. As scholars, we have to be careful of the Internet’s seemingly democratic presentation, which occludes its ability to re-present problematic one-sided information. As researchers, we have to integrate new perspectives and present them online, where there is the potential for mass access. Other projects, from David Sledge’s “When and Where Did They Paint? Schematizing Landscape with the Inventory of American Paintings” to Titia Hulst’s “Documenting the Postwar Audience for American Avant-Garde Art” used mapping technologies to give us geographical or informational maps, which allow us to propose alternative art histories. The full presentations can be watched here.

The workshop on November 16 distilled these major concerns into four categories— Access & Pedagogy, Data Management, Research Methodology & e-Publishing, and the creation of a Tool Kit for Scholars. Attendees at the workshop included Kate Haw, the Director of the Archives of American Art, Kelly Quinn from the Terra Foundation’s Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives, Emily Shapiro, the Executive Editor for American Art, Louisa Ruby from the Frick Library, Hilary Culbertson, Program Coordinator of HASTAC and other curators and doctoral candidates with an interest in the topic. The conversation was lively and groups generated project proposals that will certainly benefit the field in the future.

I found that the most pressing issue, the scattered and often piecemeal initiatives of so many major organizations, was not addressed. From my conversations with curators at Rhizome and the New Museum, and constructors of visualization projects at the Getty—I know that similar workshops and discussions have been happening for curators of contemporary art for the past decade. How can we bridge this divide between the scholars of a history of American Art pre-1985 and those of art with digital tools post-1989? We are all asking the same questions and in many cases require overlapping and similar solutions. By bringing together scholars from disparate fields with multiple funding options, I hope that innovations can be shared across platform, and perhaps approach our democratic ideals of digital technologies. THATCamp CAA in Chicago should certainly address this issue since they are in a wonderful position to do so.

Andrianna Campbell is a PhD candidate in Art History and Graduate Teaching Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Centre as well as an Adjunct Lecturer at Parsons, The New School for Design. She received a BFA (2001) in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.