I took this photo about a month ago in the historically rich state archives of Siena. A group of archive-oriented PhD students were given the opportunity to interact with primary documents for two weeks in Florence. We had held and touched letters and documents, learning to read them and navigate the arcane system of Italian archives. This was the concluding day, a field trip to the Archivio di Stato of Siena, an archive still housed in an old Palazzo which imparted the documents with an added gravitas.

By the time I was in Florence for the seminar with the Medici Archive Project, I knew that I was going to be participating in Building a Digital Portfolio. While spending two weeks in archives, I felt transported to the world before the digital. But my archival research is not that distant from digital humanities. Like Jules Prown’s Copley research (2001), the success of my doctoral dissertation relies on massive quantities of data. I hope that digital art history will help me interpret the data that I will potentially uncover during my research. Making these two institutes a perfect pair for the summer before I begin writing my dissertation.

Source: Digitizing My Scholarship