John Resig’s post “Using Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives” was both inspiring and eye-opening. Among other things, it triggered the realization that there may already exist digital tools that would simplify some of the more painstaking and error-prone tasks that my work on the Harry Callahan survey comprises. One of the overarching complications of this project is the need to aggregate a set of collection records from ten separate institutions whose own styles and standards—of cataloging, of digitizing—are widely divergent. Another is the task of linking multiple copies of the same image across collections, despite potential discrepancies in metadata. Much of this work I’ve been resigned to doing by hand and eye, but, again, I’m beginning to realize that there may be a better way. Call it a first step into the light of Digital Art History? Tools to corral and correct the data even before the work of interpretation and dissemination begins.

As a test case for the Building a Digital Portfolio institute, I’m curious to see what I can do with these piles of placeholder thumbnail images that I’ve culled from the checklists of the collections included in our survey. They’re pretty raw as data goes, or clumsy at least, currently severed from their associated metadata, and all over the map in terms of image quality. What can I make of them in the next two weeks? What can they suggest about the potential for this project, and the tools that might speed it on its way?

Source: a project wish list

Many thanks to the Roy Rosenzwieg Center for New Media at George Mason and the Getty, I’m becoming the author of my web presence.

Source: Grateful to GMU, CHNM and the Getty

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

This is an experiment. Which is perfect for what I do, which is: study the interconnected histories of art and alchemy, two disciplines that were continually discovering new means and methods of exploring the natural world. As part of the 2015 Getty Foundation’s “Doing Digital Art HIstory” initiative, this blog was created at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. I hope to share here pieces of my research, but also my research process. How does one move from art into alchemy? Well, whether it’s in the 17th century or yesterday, the answer is: very intuitively. Art and alchemy share a great deal in their materials, the questions they ask, and the ways they make claims to greatness, authenticity and authority. My background in studio art has informed my decisions (my desires, really) to focus on the way things are made, as much as the things themselves. So from art I came to alchemy, looking for the origins of color, oil, varnish, and etcher’s acid.

Anyway. Thanks for joining me. And if you have a moment, enjoy a fun look at a recent experiment I took part in, along with the laboratory team at Columbia University’s “Making and Knowing” Project:

Making and Knowing (Fake) Coral from ChemHeritage on Vimeo.

Source: Welcome to Baroquen!

The “other” architecture is a proposal for a fragmented digital-based “history of architecture.” The goal is to challenge the construction of peripheries through the narrative of architectural history in  academia. The digital media seems to have enormous opportunities to replace the traditional grand narrative of architectural history with a multitude of narratives, which could challenge the dichotomy of the core and peripheries.

Introduction

History of Architecture survey courses are traditionally taught through a linear chronicle of monuments, which forges a sharply self-contained, progressive Western architecture. Contrasted to the mainstream, other traditions become marginal, ahistorical, primitive, deviated or derivative. The past few decades have witnessed many criticisms to the processes through which non-western architectural traditions have been classified as “others”. In response to the criticism, new trends have adopted an inclusive, global approach, which expands subjects on non-Western architecture and reconsiders the traditional structure of survey books and courses – one that either divides “Western” and “non-Western” architectures or sandwiches different non-Western traditions in intervals of the chronologically-ordered Western styles. However, as some critics have pointed out, these well-meaning attempts to empower the peripheries, at the same time, reaffirms the margin/center, self/other, West/non-West and similar hierarchical dualities. An important element of the traditional model, I would argue, is the structure of courses, taken directly from the printed book. In fact, a linear narrative imposed by the sequence of the classes in the lecture-based pedagogical model can hardly avoid reproducing an evolutionary core and consequently turning the rest into marginal “others.”

In this project, I want to work on an alternative, digital-based approach to teaching Histories of World Architectures with various historical, geographical and thematic layers. As the examples from a less formal institutions –the museum– suggest, (see my paper here) more successful than the attempts to increase inclusiveness, appreciate the other in his/her own terms and “give voice to the natives” have been those that reject grand narratives and/or focus on the problematization of cultural prejudices.

Interface  

wiki-format: entries are connected with tags; but there is no overall image

navigation:

Timeline·  Main monuments in zoom view·  Colored based on styles/themes
Interactive Map·  Highlighted in relation to timeline·  Main monuments in zoom view Colored based on Tags (types/styles/themes)
pop-up window·  On the map·  In the timeline·  With tags to themes
Navigation Bar·  Time·  Regions·  Monuments·  Themes

Cities / Regions/countries·  change by timeMonuments
Tags·  styles / periods / places-  related styles·  types·  themes
Colors·  chosen based on themes ® reflected on the geo-temporal map

Content 

see the draft  here

Source: The “Other” Architecture -draft

Thresholds, edges, the verge.

The theme of Day 1 of RRCHNM’s Digital Art History summer workshop turned continually upon us (the 20 graduate student cohort) being not only at the outset of our understanding of the field, but also circling the shifting boundaries of the Digital Art History field itself. My impression from today is that DAH is in constant evolution, both theoretically and in terms of software, so it’s important not to rest too heavily on a static way of using tools or sites. As our workshop Co-Director Sharon Leon succinctly put it: the aim of our time here is learning how to learn.

Following a healthy debate on the threshold concepts of History of Art (multiple perspectives, multiple and contradictory causes and the critical analysis of objects all won support) the group started to consider the value of building a professional identity online. Discussion was swiftly followed by action, a refrain that will undoubtedly be repeated this week, and this blog was born.

One of my primary hopes for the next two weeks is that I come to understand how to ask new research questions of the theatrical portraits which I study, ones that take better advantage of digital capabilities. To this end, I have been considering how mapping might help me to understand how actors and actresses interacted with London-based portraitists from the early to mid-nineteenth century. Of course, that is very big question but learning how to wrangle a modest amount of data and some tools would hopefully set me on the right path. I’m also interested in comparing shifting instances of corporeal pose between a range of performers and hope that learning how to build digital collections will make associations possible. Tomorrow I’m looking forward to getting a handle on major digital image collections, metadata and (more prosaically) my jetlag.

Source: Building a Digital Portfolio Day 1: Art Historians on the Brink

Yesterday I gathered with a group of art history graduate students at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University for the first day of a two-week workshop on the digital humanities. When we tried to define this field that each of us has been hearing so much about we couldn’t come up with a satisfying definition, other than to say it is more than MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) or simply placing information online. Things got even more contentious when we tried to come up with the “threshold values” for teaching students art history. My work group proposed that the most basic and major principle of art history was getting students to take the visual seriously and understand that it has serious consequences. This involves getting them to recognize a number of factors: that makers have to make decisions about every element of an artwork (visual analysis), that visual objects embody changing ideas (context), that time and place can change the meaning of object to viewers (reception). So how can the tools of digital humanities help art historians convey these basic tenets in our teaching and in our research?

I am here because I have a couple of ongoing projects in which I think digital media would help me convey my findings and arguments better. The first is my dissertation. I am researching the meaning of images of Croatian folk culture in interwar Yugoslavia, and specifically I am looking at the folkloric works of modern Croatian-American artist Maksimilijan Vanka as a guiding thread. Because no catalogue raisonne exists for this relatively unknown artist, I have been compiling a small but thorough catalog about his folkloric works (about 17 works) which I would like to integrate into my dissertation so that the reader has points of reference.

The project explores national identity, but it is also problematicizing how folkloric imagery has been rather simplistically categorized as nationalist when in fact it represents a broad range of early-twentieth-century Central European identities of which Croatian nationalism and Yugoslavism were just two multifaceted and competing forms. If we take the standard definition of nationalism as the desire to bring political borders in line with perceived cultural boarders, sometimes this plays out in the visual culture with which I work as the tracing of borders through images of regionally-specific folk culture. But one of the points I am laboring to convey to my reader is that Vanka did not participate in this Croatian border building, instead his paintings depict the folk cultures of a remarkable variety of distinct locations, but all within a small region of Central Croatia. Since the average reader does not the geographic knowledge of Croatia to fully comprehend this argument in written form, I would like to find a way of mapping this.

Source: Making art history digital