International Journal for Digital Art History: Issue 3, 2018


Book Description

Art History is centrally concerned with a vast array of three-dimensional objects, such as sculptures, and spaces, such as architecture. Digital technologies allow the creation of virtual spaces, which in turn allow us to simulate and compare aspects of a visual culture's three-dimensional timespace that cannot be communicated as a single, still image. The third issue, thus, focusses on the third dimension in Art History, and the digital realm that continues to mediate and transform it.




The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.




Trading Zones of Digital History


Book Description

Digital history is commonly argued to be positioned between the traditionally historical and the computational or digital. By studying digital history collaborations and the establishment of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Kemman examines how digital history will impact historical scholarship. His analysis shows that digital history does not occupy a singular position between the digital and the historical. Instead, historians continuously move across this dimension, choosing or finding themselves in different positions as they construct different trading zones through cross-disciplinary engagement, negotiation of research goals and individual interests.




Painting by Numbers


Book Description

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Upending traditional perspectives on the art historical canon, Painting by Numbers offers an innovative look at the nineteenth-century art world and its legacy.




Computational Humanities


Book Description

The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, Computational Humanities redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders? Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of data, from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content, have enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume highlights both opportunities and frictions, showing that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about p-values. Contributors: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford U; David Bamman, U of California, Berkeley; Kaspar Beelen, U of London; Peter Bell, Philipps U of Marburg; Tobias Blanke, U of Amsterdam; Julia Damerow, Arizona State U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Crystal Nicole Eddins, U of Pittsburgh; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Tassie Gniady; Crystal Hall, Bowdoin College; Vanessa M. Holden, U of Kentucky; David Kloster, Indiana U; Manfred D. Laubichler, Arizona State U; Katherine McDonough, Lancaster U; Barbara McGillivray, King’s College London; Megan Meredith-Lobay, Simon Fraser U; Federico Nanni, Alan Turing Institute; Fabian Offert, U of California, Santa Barbara; Hannah Ringler, Illinois Institute of Technology; Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College; Joshua D. Rothman, U of Alabama; Benjamin M. Schmidt; Lisa Tagliaferri, Rutgers U; Jeffrey Tharsen, U of Chicago; Marieke van Erp, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Lee Zickel, Case Western Reserve U.




Painters and Communities in Seventeenth-Century Brussels


Book Description

In seventeenth-century Brussels, the careers of painters were shaped not only by their artistic talents but also by the communities to which they belonged. This book explores the intricate relationship between the social structures and artistic production of the 353 painters who became masters in the Brussels Guild of Painters, Goldbeaters, and Stained-Glass Makers between 1599 and 1706. This innovative study combines quantitative digital analysis with detailed qualitative case studies, offering a novel approach to the social history of art. By examining the various communities in which these artists operated, this book provides new insights into how early modern painters — both in Brussels and beyond — created their art, earned a living, and navigated the complexities of urban life. Painters and Communities in Seventeenth-Century Brussels also presents the first overview of the Brussels Baroque, with extensive biographical lists of the city’s master painters.




Leonardo da Vinci


Book Description

How our image of the Renaissance’s most famous artist is a modern myth Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value. In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.




Empowering the Visibility of Croatian Cultural Heritage through the Digital Humanities


Book Description

This volume brings together selected papers covering topics related to the contemporary cultural heritage research framework within the field of Digital Humanities (DH). Intended for scholars, students and practitioners, the book provides the reader with insights into the description and access, and digitization of cultural heritage. It also explores Croatian Glagolitic and Latin written heritage as a source for historiographic and linguistic research. It is organized into seven topics, each questioning one of the research areas within the DH framework, namely DH as a contemporary cultural heritage research framework; the description of, and access to, cultural heritage; the digitization of cultural heritage; written heritage as a source for historiographic and linguistic research; literary studies; research and communication of cultural heritage; and education in the field of DH.




Writing Architectural History


Book Description

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.




Scenography and Art History


Book Description

Scenography and Art History reimagines scenography as a critical concept for art history, and is the first book to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of this concept for art historians and scholars in related fields. It provides a vital evaluation of the contemporary importance of scenography as a critical tool for art historians and scholars from related branches of study addressing phenomena such as witchy designs, Early Modern festival books, live rock performances, digital fashion photography, and outdoor dance interventions. With its nuanced and detailed case studies, this book is an innovative contribution to ongoing debates within art history and visual studies concerning multisensory events. It extends the existing literature by demonstrating the importance of a reimagined scenography concept for comprehending historical and contemporary art histories and visual cultures more broadly. The book contends that scenography is no longer restricted to the traditional space of the theatre, but has become an important concept for approaching art historical and contemporary objects and events. It explores scenography not solely as a critical approach and theoretical concept, but also as an important practice linked with unrecognized labour and broader political, social and gendered issues in a great variety of contexts, such as festive culture, sacred settings, fashion, film, or performing arts. Designed as a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in art history, visual studies, and related subjects, the book, through its cross-disciplinary frame, does consider, implicitly and explicitly, the roles of both scenography and art in society.