When I submitted my dissertation prospectus in 2012, I was confronted by one of my committee members with the idea that I needed to do “something” digital, although the parameters of that assignment were left up to me and whatever I could figure out was possible to do with my research. As I’ve spent the last few years conducting “traditional” art historical research (and by “traditional” I mean making site visits, extensive photographic campaigns, and collocation of appropriate secondary historical materials), I’ve struggled a lot with defining exactly how that elusive “something” would manifest itself from the information I’ve gathered. I don’t have training in digital humanities, but I have often wished that I possessed the technical skills necessary to design fully fledged, three-dimensional reconstructions of the monuments I study as I have seen done for a number of ancient art historical and archaeological projects (and as the Ithaka S+R report points out has been a somewhat longer-standing practice for ancient art historians than many other disciplines).

I have experimented some using Google SketchUp in nascent attempts to reconstruct the three-dimensional experience of the funerary monuments at the core of my dissertation, and, considering that many tombs were originally covered and then recovered after modern excavations, I still think that this is an important element of my project. The tombs in my study are a small, representative sample of the hundreds of cases in which the discovery of an ancient funerary monument was briefly excavated, briefly published (often in Turkish, a language inaccessible to many Western scholars), and frequently left to the goodwill of the rural population living near it. If I can strengthen my skills in using modeling software, I believe that visualizing these monuments can make a significant contribution and give the tombs an appropriate place in scholarly discussions. One of the first things I tell my introductory art history students is that the two driving questions of the class are: 1) What does it look like? and 2) Why does it look that way? Quite frankly, the state of published photographs and reports of my lesser-known tombs make it nearly impossible to answer the first of these questions, which is why I want to focus a lot of energy on this part of my project.

I’ve also dabbled a bit with mapping technology, although I’m a bit less sure of how to create a truly effective map of each site. GoogleEarth Pro has a really great viewshed analysis feature that I’ve used, but I’d like to go beyond simply plotting GPS coordinates on a map. I want to know how to layer maps to show different types of monuments, perhaps even over time, and start to ask questions about the geographical and chronological distribution of certain types of tombs. I started thinking about this a lot during the discussions today regarding digital collections – I started to realize that I do, in fact, have my own collection of data (images, GPS coordinates, etc.) that has been silently amassing over the last couple of years, and I have no idea how to organize it! Visualizing chronological and geographical trends in this way could generate new questions and methods of analysis of the historical trajectory of certain architectural types.

And, finally, the process of converting my information in this way has me thinking a lot about medium. I felt a sense of camaraderie with the art historians in the Ithaka report who still preferred researching and comparing images via print media, but I think in many ways this works better if the images you are looking at are contained in separate volumes; only then is it possible to have multiple pages open at the same time. Flipping back and forth between different pages of the same book in order to compare images is a cumbersome task, and I think that curating a digital image collection in which multiple images could be viewed simultaneously, rather than the traditional method of placing one or two images on a page in a Word document, would be a significant (and beneficial) alteration to structuring the catalogue accompanying my dissertation text. What if, instead of printing out hundreds of pages of images for each committee member, I could send them a link to the images that enabled zooming, comparison, map placement, and metadata visualization all at the same time?

I’m excited to see what other possibilities arise out of our discussions. I never really thought of myself as having a “collection” before, but thinking about my data in that way could start some really interesting changes to how I structure my project.

Source: Refocusing