Strategy 1. Use Precise Terms to Facilitate Incisive Discourse

The field of digital humanities in large part resulted from the recognition, by librarians, archivists, scholars, and others, of technology as a force that implicates the humanities as a whole, cutting across disciplinary and institutional boundaries and across multiple stages of practice, from research to publishing. The establishment of digital humanities as a field over the past twenty or so years—the creation of digital humanities institutions, positions at universities, publishing outlets, and funding mechanisms—is one result of this widespread realization. However, the emergence of digital humanities as a field has arguably also had the effect of reinforcing the impression among some that the digital humanities, including subfields like digital art history, exist apart from normative disciplinary activities. For example, although she does not explicitly define the term in her 2012 report, “Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, Its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship,” Diane M. Zorich discusses digital art history as a discrete entity that exists apart from the discipline itself. Writing of art history’s “ambivalence about digital art history,” she maintains that “those who believe in the potential of digital art history feel it will open up new avenues of inquiry and scholarship, allow greater access to art historical information, provide broader dissemination of scholarly research, and enhance undergraduate and graduate teaching” (6). Similarly, Claire Bishop comments in “Against Digital Art History” that “practitioners of digital art history have a limited awareness of critical debates within art history,” a statement that implies such practitioners are non-art historians (125).

Statements like Zorich’s and Bishop’s help create the impression of two art histories: one digital and one nondigital. Framed in this way, any use of technology is external to art history, brought into the discipline only via digital art history. Furthermore, all things related to digital technologies—hardware, software, data, methodologies like social network analysis, digitization of library and archival materials—are conflated within a single, undifferentiated category. As art historian Pamela Fletcher notes, these diverse things and activities have been collapsed in art-historical discourse, at least, into the concept of “the digital.”3 Thus, the word digital is deployed as a catchall term used to refer to any project, tool, or method that involves the use of computers. Projects are often titled “Digital X.”4 Critics and practitioners discuss “digital projects” when referring to a wide range of initiatives that involve different aspects of the scholarly process (e.g., research, scholarly communication), formats (e.g., websites, epubs), methods (e.g., social network analysis, topic modeling), computing applications (e.g., databases, programming, computer vision), and outcome types (e.g., publications, teaching tools, research platforms).5

As a result of this leveling, critiques of digital art history muddle together concepts and issues that are at best loosely related. In their “Conversation on Digital Art History,” for example, Drucker and Bishop address an astounding range and variety of topics, from labor practices and graduate student training to the use of data and databases to support research, methods of computational analysis, neoliberalism, funding sources for digital humanities, and the materiality of objects. Indeed, Drucker points out to Bishop that “dismissing ‘digital art history’ as if it is singular or monolithic does not do justice to the complex variety of work being done and its proven and potential value.” As Drucker suggests, a debate that treats such disparate phenomena as equivalents is a blunted one, limited to high-level, unspecific, or scattershot critiques that obfuscate rather than clarify what is at stake in the encounter between digital technologies and art-historical research and scholarship.

Furthermore, within this unfocused discourse, projects and publications are often defined by (or confined to) their “digital-ness”—that is, their computerized format or means of production—rather than on the extent to which an author or project team has engaged critically with a particular method or taken advantage of some affordance specific to the digital environment. In “Against Digital Art History,” for example, Bishop takes issue with the network diagram presented as part of the 2012–2013 exhibition Inventing Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), arguing that with the diagram, “carefully reasoned historical narrative is replaced by social network (the avant-garde equivalent of LinkedIn) and has no room for non-human agents that elude quantification” (125). Bishop points to this diagram as a failure of “digital art history,” yet her analysis does not distinguish between a critique of the use of social network theory as a methodology and the related but separate critique of the digital means through which the social network diagram was created—for example, of the software application or dataset used to produce it. It remains unclear if what Bishop finds problematic is the digital components of the diagram, its underlying methodology, or both.

Compare Bishop’s assessment with a similar one authored by art historians Nicole E. Reiner and Jonathan Patkowski. In their critique of the Inventing Abstraction diagram, Reiner and Patkowski agree with Bishop that the diagram problematically injects into the exhibition a set of neoliberal attitudes toward labor and art-making and moreover, in doing so, excludes non-European objects (8). However, the two scholars level their critique specifically at social network theory rather than at “the digital” overall. In articulating their position, they provide a thorough analysis both of social network theory as a method and how it was applied in this case, contextualizing their argument within art-historical discourse by referencing, for example, critical appraisals of contemporary museum practice authored by sociologist Tony Bennett and art historian Carol Duncan (Reiner and Patkowski, 12). Of course, Reiner and Patkowski’s article is devoted entirely to the Inventing Abstraction diagram, as opposed to Bishop’s article, which mentions the diagram only briefly. However, this reflects another issue that results from defining something like the MoMA diagram in vague terms as a “digital art history approach.” When a variety of disparate initiatives, methods, and tools are collapsed into the same broad category of “the digital,” discourse remains stuck at an abstract level. The specificity of Reiner and Patkowski’s analysis exemplifies the kind of critical engagement that would facilitate a more robust and productive discourse on digital art history.

Like the use of the phrase “digital art history approach” to characterize the MoMA diagram, the use of terms like “digital method” can, directly and indirectly, often encourage rhetorical conflation. In fact there is no such thing as a digital method, although there are methodologies that rely more heavily than others on technological tools. Social network analysis, for example, is a method that is particularly well served by computer-based tools like AllegroGraph or Gephi, but the approach is not a wholly digital one. Social network theory has roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having emerged from the discipline of sociology as a way to model and research the way humans interact and behave in groups.6 Like any established methodology, social network theory is associated with a specialized bibliography and a specific critical discourse, both of which stand apart from, although they are linked to, the digital humanities.

Of course, it is important and necessary to investigate the mutual influence between a research methodology and the various tools used to apply it. The key in doing so is to distinguish between the two and not to confuse one with the other. It is entirely appropriate to critique the MoMA’s specific application of social network theory, as Reiner and Patkowski do, or to debate whether the methodology is appropriate for use in art history. However, it is important to recognize this kind of methodological critique is not necessarily the same thing as a critique of digital art history. Indeed, a critique of “digital art history” is akin to disciplinary shadowboxing: an argument with a convenient but insubstantial phantom. Rather than engage in a critique of “digital art history,” what is needed is a discourse around technology that investigates the precise ways in which particular software platforms or computational techniques intersect with concerns that are specific to our discipline.

In her article “Keeping Our Eyes Open: Visualizing Networks and Art History,” art historian Stephanie Porras provides an example of the kind of critique I mean. Porras presents a cogent analysis of the use of network diagrams and data visualization in her field of early modern Flemish art. Similar to Reiner and Patkowski, Porras does not suggest that either visualizations of datasets or network analyses are inherently problematic. Rather, she presents a critique of several different research initiatives, examining the data used for each, how that data was visualized, and the relationship of both to the underlying research questions the individual scholars were using their networks and visualizations to explore.

Porras’s article explores the positives and negatives of these projects, citing the specific kinds of research questions that these approaches can be used to investigate. Even as she points to the potential of data visualization for “exposing creative, social and economic collaborations that may have previously been marginalized,” Porras cautions against the thoughtless or uncritical use of data-driven analyses (42). She furthermore argues that scholars who engage in these practices need to ground their approach in a thorough understanding of where their data came from and what it represents, as well as being “transparent about the limitations and biases of their datasets” (48). Moreover, she connects her critique to concerns specific to the field of Flemish art history and to her own research, noting, for example, the differences between the sources and datasets she has found in European institutions versus those she has found in Peru or the Philippines.

Porras’s critique is less an examination of digital technology per se and more an exploration of the questions related to evidence, argumentation, veracity, and standards (or lack thereof) that are raised by the practices and tools associated with data visualizations. What results from her critique is a clear picture of the kinds of interventions that would be necessary to realize the potential of data-driven research in art history. For example, Porras’s article illustrates the importance of educating art historians in data literacy, since art historians need to know how to collect, edit, normalize, analyze, and share data in order to understand the potentials and biases contained in their datasets. Her article also demonstrates the need for shared standards and infrastructures for the use of research data in art history, which together would create a disciplinary framework in which art historians could expose the processes by which they have collected and analyzed their datasets in ways that could be understood by their colleagues. Porras, like Reiner and Patkowski, asks not so much whether technology was used but explores how and why it was used. More of this kind of precise analysis of the intersection between discipline-specific concerns and practices and the use of digital technologies would counteract the current fuzzy state of discourse.

The adjective “digital” is a useful term when it is signaling issues that concern multiple aspects related to the use of technology in humanities research and scholarship at a high conceptual level. Including the term “digital” or “digital humanities” in a project title or description can also be a means of attracting resources or attention to that project, as in grant applications. In addition, the term “digital art history” is a useful and necessary one, referring to a subfield of digital humanities whose practitioners—a group that includes art historians, information specialists, and computer scientists, among other experts—focus on the development and refinement of computational tools, practices, and systems designed to facilitate art-historical research and scholarship in the discipline as a whole. This work includes building tools and platforms, using them to conduct as well as publish research; crucially, it also includes establishing and sharing effective practices and standards so that these tools and platforms can be critically appraised, not only by those using them, but also by those working in the mainstream of art history.

To date, those involved in digital art history have understandably focused more on developing and using tools, practices, and systems, and far less on the kinds of activities that would integrate these with existing standards and infrastructures of art history. Yet activities related to such integration are crucial if we are to both leverage the potential and avoid the pitfalls of using computing technologies in our scholarly work. Digital art history, that is, cannot exist hived off from art history as it currently is, to a large extent. To achieve a deeper integration of art history with digital humanities, we must understand digital technologies as the result of ongoing historical processes and within their cultural, social, and political contexts. Rather than thinking only in terms of “the digital,” we must think of technological change in a more historical and socially and culturally inflected sense, to encompass, for example, both analog photography and digital imaging, or the physical printing of books as well as the production of online publications using static site generators.

Critical engagement with technologies of image production and knowledge production and dissemination is something many art historians already do. Our discipline has long been concerned with the relationships among materials, practices, tools, and techniques of artistic production and how they each (and together) inform the appearance and meaning of the artworks that result. As the next section will demonstrate, we should apply the methods of our own field to develop a nuanced discourse on digital art history that avoids conceptualizations centered on either/or, yes/no propositions. In other words, we should think in analog terms about the digital.

Strategy 2. Employ Frameworks Based on “Both/And” Instead of “Either/Or”

The notion that the use of technology exists apart from disciplinary practice fuels the perception that humanistic disciplines like art history and “the digital” are fundamentally incompatible, with the former defined by notions like subjectivity, open-ended inquiry, human intuition and invention and the latter linked to objectivity, the end of ambiguity and nuance, the replacement of humans by machines, and the dominance of corporations like Google.7 For example, critics writing about digital art history, or digital humanities more generally, often dismiss computational approaches as overly reductive and flattening in comparison with traditional approaches and portray those engaged in projects associated with digital humanities as naively fascinated by technology.8 Those praising digital art history, such as Zorich and Helmreich, traffic in similar dichotomies, characterizing the mainstream of art history as overly conservative and “slow” to embrace the technology, for example, in comparison with digital art history, which is treated as inherently more innovative and collaborative.9 The Manichaean terms of this debate leave little room for ambiguity. Furthermore, they create a scenario wherein the daily use of technology is invisible while other, more specialized applications are defined only in terms of the presence of technology.

“Both/and” formulations would help foster a discourse that resists polarizing binaries and focuses our attention instead on the ways that categories such as digital/analog, science/humanities, machine/human, and materiality/immateriality might not be mutually exclusive but in fact may shape one another in fundamental ways. Considering where, for example, exactitude becomes nuance, where and how data is transformed into knowledge, or where the virtual shades into the material (or vice versa) can create a more robust discourse that foregrounds the interconnectedness of these apparent dualities. Finally, conceptualizing digital humanities debates in terms of “both/and” creates a discourse around technology and humanities practice that can address a broader range of activities, from our daily use of digital technologies, like PowerPoint for slide lectures, to the more computationally or expertise-intensive practices commonly associated with the digital humanities.10

Art history already brings together the open-ended, subjective, and qualitative practices associated with the humanities with the precise, objective, and quantitative practices thought of as the purview of the sciences. Elizabeth Mansfield makes this point in her essay “Art History and Modernism” in the edited volume Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline. She argues that art-historical practice “combines the authenticating and valuating mission of the connoisseur, the hagiographic indulgences of the biographer, the cataloguing impulse of the botanist, the alternately reflective and reflexive tendencies of the historian, and the philosopher’s willingness to calibrate aesthetic transcendence” (11). This fusion of the scientific and humanistic that characterizes art history is perhaps most apparent in the field’s engagement with the art object through conservation science.

Conservators working in museums, archives, and libraries employ scientific analysis to date artworks and determine what they are made of or how they were made, with the goal of maintaining and preserving them. Analyses of paints or pigments, types of paper, and the weave patterns of canvas not only inform strategies for repairing damaged paintings or manuscripts or mitigating their physical deterioration, they can also become the basis for broader, more interpretive arguments about these objects. Conservator and art historian E. Melanie Gifford, for example, used x-radiography, false color infrared reflectography (IRR), and pigment analysis through light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy to analyze Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of Phaeton (begun ca. 1604–1605, completed ca. 1610–1612) for a 2019 essay in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Gifford’s scientific analysis helped her develop a more precise understanding of how the painting’s composition evolved; moreover, it supported her conclusion that in reworking the painting, Rubens had sought “not to update The Fall of Phaeton for sale but to use it for research as he sought a solution to a specific compositional problem raised by other works” (para. 8).

Gifford uses material evidence, scientifically derived, to draw subjective conclusions about Rubens’s practice and the significance of The Fall of Phaeton within his oeuvre. Her examination of “the painting sequence and the handling of paint revealed in IRR and x-radiography” allows her to determine the order in which the various parts of the painting’s composition were executed, information that forms the basis of her interpretation of Rubens’s “individual working habits” (para. 25). Pigment analysis, combined with direct, visual inspection, supports Gifford’s conclusion that particular passages (a figure’s cloak, another’s hand) convey a subjective “sense of brilliant, painterly immediacy” (para. 16).

The example of Gifford’s analysis of The Fall of Phaeton reminds us that the divisions between the objective and subjective or scientific and humanistic are not always so neat; moreover, such categories are not inherently oppositional nor are they mutually exclusive. A particular observable characteristic, such as color, can have multiple dimensions. Color can be represented in a word like yellow, through a chemical notation like CdS (cadmium sulfide), as a hexadecimal notation (#FFF600), as a standardized descriptor (“vivid greenish yellow”), or a refractive index (2.529). None of these appellations are better than any other; rather, the appropriateness of one versus another depends on the argument a scholar is trying to make. Thus, in one part of her essay, Gifford cites “vermilion” as part of making a particular point, while elsewhere she mentions “red-orange strokes” (para. 20, 11). Conservation reports on The Fall of Phaeton, meanwhile, likely documented colors by wavelengths or chemical notations. Each of these formats exists within specific systems of analysis and interpretation, and part of our training as art historians and humanists is learning how to navigate these systems in ways that are often inflected by the practices and standards of particular disciplines.

The nuances of how such systems operate is worth remembering in the context of digital art history debate, in which information and evidence are often discussed in terms that are totalizing and that do not necessarily reference these systems. Data is (much like “the digital”) treated as a monolithic entity, at once abstract and generalized, real and specific. For example, Bishop complains that in digital art history, as she defines it, “theoretical problems are steamrollered flat by the weight of data,” while in a 2012 critique of the digital humanities, writer Stephen Marche defines data in a similar way as “information” that is always complete and can be “processed,” in contrast to literature, which is “incomplete,” “messy,” and therefore data’s “opposite” (Bishop, 125; Marche). Through such language, all data is characterized as overly neat and tidy and lacking in nuance. Its compilation is “mindless” rote work and thus nonintellectual.11 This characterization of data, however, assumes that it exists in a vacuum, outside particular information systems, which it virtually never does. A data element like “CdS” is interpretable within the system of chemical notation, and the phrase “vivid greenish yellow” means something precise within the standardized vocabulary created by Inter-Society Color Council and the National Bureau of Standards. Are either of these terms overly precise or “flattening”? The question does not make sense in the abstract.

In fact, data is neither inherently neat and precise nor ambiguous and messy, but it can be characterized as either or both, depending on factors like its context, the specific research questions of the scholar using it, and the specific systems for which it was formatted.12 The variety of systems that process data, along with the numerous standards for formatting and entering it, mean that in daily practice, data can absolutely be messy, ambiguous, or incomplete. Data can contain and express inexactness and subtlety, as in modifiers like “circa” for dates or “school of” for creators’ names. Moreover, such concepts are contingent, and what is precise in one context may be ambiguous in another. The data element “school of Rembrandt” could be regarded by a researcher as very precise, and indeed the term “school of” is defined very specifically in the Getty Vocabulary Program’s Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA).13 If one knew nothing else about the artwork it referred to, the designation “school of Rembrandt” would at least place the work in a particular place and time. If one’s research question required knowing more about the work’s author, however, this term could be considered too vague to be helpful; while “school of Rembrandt” creates a meaningful association, the nature of that association, such as how the artist came to know and be influenced by Rembrandt, is open and subjective.

Data is not inherently messy or neat, and likewise the amassing of data, in databases for example, cannot be considered either wholly rote or entirely subjective. Rather, different forms of data compilation require different degrees of objectivity and standardization versus interpretation. In art history, the catalogue raisonné is essentially a work of data compilation, yet no art historian would characterize such a project as purely mechanistic or entirely objective. At the same time, catalogues raisonnés are considered the definitive testament of an artist’s oeuvre, used to help determine whether a particular artwork is authentic or a forgery. They document facts about artists and artworks but at the same time require interpretative acts. Scholars use a variety of means to ascertain authorship, for example, but such determinations are not always conclusive.14 Thus, a single artist can be the subject of multiple catalogues raisonnés, and the debate about how many drawings are considered the work of Michelangelo can remain open, even one hundred plus years after it began. The catalogue raisonné can exist at once as a definitive and authoritative document, establishing the oeuvre of an artist, and as work of art-historical scholarship.

The either/or framing of questions related to digital art history has obscured those areas of art-historical research and scholarship that lie between the digital, objective, and definitive and the analog, subjective, and open-ended. This framing has also fueled a preponderance of what historian Gabrielle Hecht calls “rupture-talk,” a term describing a discourse that unfolds in totalizing and binary terms. Hecht’s use of the term is part of her analysis of the debate around nuclear weapons, which during the Cold War were discussed either as guarantors of peace or agents of annihilation but, in any case, as having “changed the world forever” (Hecht, 691). In the context of art history, rupture-talk is evident in debates that present technology as a force that that will either kill the discipline or save it from its inflexibility and irrelevance, but which regardless will wholly transform it.15 This kind of rupture-talk is problematic, according to Hecht, not only because it creates a discourse in which complex issues are distilled into black-and-white polarities but also because it “produce[s] vacuums between the poles” (Hecht, 693). Critics focus on extremes and effectively cannot see what lies between them.

With regard to digital art history, rupture-talk has been filtered most often through a conceptualization of “digitized” versus “digital” art history suggested by Johanna Drucker in her 2013 article “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?” In it, she argues that “a clear distinction has to be made between the use of online repositories and images, which is digitized art history, and the use of analytic techniques enabled by computational technology that is the proper domain of digital art history” (7). Drucker’s distinction is cited frequently in texts authored both by those who embrace the use of computational technologies for art-historical practice, such as the introduction of the Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, and by those who are skeptical of it, including Bishop in “Against Digital Art History” (Brown, 2; Bishop, 123). Regardless, those who reference it generally characterize “digitized art history” as a convenience that has only an “incidental impact” on the field, in the words of a 2014 Ithaka S+R report on “Preparing for the Future of Research Services for Art History” (Long and Schonfeld, 200). In contrast, digital art history, as Drucker defines it, is interpreted as “affecting the evolution and fundamental approaches of the discipline as a whole” (Drucker et al., 13, n1), and thus as having a greater potential to transform art history.

Filtered through Drucker’s conception, rupture-talk around “the digital” and art history creates a framework in which technology is understood either to be wholly transformative or entirely incidental. As result, the continuum between these two poles and, moreover, the ways in which technology is already embedded in our art-historical practice are obscured. For example, the use of digital images and PowerPoint has been absorbed into the daily practice of art history to the extent that most art historians would not understand the use of digital images as related in any way to digital art history. Yet, this kind of daily use, especially when one considers that it takes place at the scale of the entire discipline, has a potential to be as transformative as any “analytic techniques enabled by computational technology.” It is significant, for example, that art historians regularly treat these images uncritically as digitized equivalents to the 35-millimeter slide. Images of paintings, for example, are pasted into PowerPoint “slides,” usually as two-dimensional, frontal-view representations, often stripped of their frames.

Around the time the use of digital images was becoming common in art history, art historian Robert S. Nelson pointed out the “profound impact” the traditional slide lecture had had on the discipline in an essay that considered questions such as “How do art historians make arguments with slides? Why do audiences accept speaker and reproduction and the conclusions they offer? And, above all, what is a slide, and how does its presence condition the entire presentation?” (“The Slide Lecture,” 415). Certainly, the same kinds of questions could be asked of digital images and PowerPoint slideshows and related phenomena, such as repositories like ArtStor and, with Covid-19, the rise of Zoom-based presentations. Drucker herself argues in “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?” that “digitization is not representation but interpretation” (italics in original), noting that “every choice made about transforming an analog image into a digital file or, in the case of born-digital materials, creating the original format, is part of a chain of decisions.” Moreover, she maintains that “these decisions carry interpretative inflection; they are not neutral or value-free, and each privileges one aspect of a digital artifact at the expense of others” (12).

I would argue that the distinction Drucker made between digitized and digital art history has been mischaracterized as a difference. While it is certainly true that the digitization of photographs is not the same thing as, for example, the use of a computer vision algorithm to detect similarities across a corpus of images, critics have overemphasized the difference between these two phenomena. At the very least, they are discussed as if they are wholly disconnected. However, as I have argued thus far, and as Drucker’s own essay demonstrates, digitized and digital art history are deeply interconnected aspects of the same technological evolution. For one thing, the application of computationally enabled techniques like computer vision is built on and facilitated by what she calls digitized art history.

Ultimately, the set of practices and tools associated with both digitization and computational analysis are manifestations of the changed and changing interactions between the domains and systems that process and provide access to art-historical information—namely, libraries, archives, and museums—and the domains and systems in which art-historical knowledge is produced by curators, professors, critics, and other practitioners of art history. As Drucker argues, and as I have argued elsewhere, this is an ecosystem in which changes in one domain can create ripple effects across the entire system.16 Thus, while art historians certainly do not need to theorize their use of digital images in every PowerPoint slide they create, they should neither forget that a digital image is not a direct equivalent of an analog photograph nor dismiss their reliance on such images as wholly inconsequential.

If we exclude activities like digitization from our understanding of digital art history or even digital humanities, we obscure the cultural, social, and economic circumstances that precede and are produced by processes like technical imaging or the preservation of digital data.17 Furthermore, we exclude critical issues that fundamentally shape how or to what extent the computational tools, practices, and systems being developed in digital art history are integrated into the mainstream of art history. An example of one such issue is the labor of digitization, which is explored by digitization specialist Astrid J. Smith and English professor Bridget Whearty in Chapter 2 of this book. Smith and Whearty explicate the complex and arduous but largely unseen work that is required to transform documents, artworks, video and audio media, and other analog materials into digital formats that can be processed, cataloged, and accessed using contemporary information systems, arguing that “terms that are conventionally used in humanities scholarship obfuscate digitization and what it produces.” The authors present a critical analysis of the labor of digitization in specific terms, highlighting the dependence of computational analyses on digitized materials and exposing the implications of ignoring the logistic processes and economic concerns that digitization entails.

It is understandable that critics have tended to dismiss routine uses of technology, such as the creation of a PowerPoint slide deck or the digitization of an archival document, as largely insignificant vis-à-vis scholarship. The nature and extent of technological changes can be difficult to detect in the time in which the changes are unfolding. A development that might seem transformative at the time can later appear less noteworthy; alternatively, what might seem like a minor development can in hindsight be regarded as a watershed moment. Gaining perspective can be difficult, which is one reason why grounding debates about technological change in historical contexts can be very helpful in revealing the true effects and extents of such changes. Once again, the discipline of art history already provides models for analyzing technological change and innovation within social, historical contexts. Photo historians and other scholars, for example, have explored the notion that photography existed as an idea before the invention of the camera.18 Similarly, as I will explain in the next section, projects that are framed in such a way as to situate contemporary technologies within longer historical time frames and broader social, economic, and cultural contexts can provide insight into which aspects of modern technology’s use or implementation may be more fleeting versus which might be more lasting.

Strategy 3. Situate Inquiry in Historical, Social, Economic, Cultural, and Disciplinary Contexts

In The Railway Journey, historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes nineteenth-century travelers as overwhelmed by the train, which seemed to them to have “interjected itself between the traveler and the landscape” (24). Perceived as an incursion, the train “did not appear embedded in the space of the landscape the way coach and highway [were], but seemed to strike its way through it” (37). In contrast, older travel technologies were regarded as more authentic and organic, even as “having more ‘soul’” in comparison with the train, which with its “tremendous technical discipline” was thought of as “more derived, more unnatural, even more restrictive” (24, 13). The train and its related infrastructure were so physically imposing and so different from previous modes of transportation that for some travelers in the nineteenth century, their presence threw into stark relief what was being lost versus gained through technological innovation. In responding to this technological change, travelers focused their attention on its physical manifestation, what Schivelbusch terms “the machine ensemble,” yet what he demonstrates with his study is that one of the most transformative and lasting effects of the train’s invention was also one of its most ineffable: the “industrialization of space and time.”

Similarly, those skeptical of the relevance of technology for humanities practice often view technology as an external force invading the discipline and as restrictive and soulless.19 Moreover, they focus their critique on the computer itself and its related infrastructure—the internet, data systems, software, algorithms, or corporations like Google or Amazon. However, in directing attention on the “digital ensemble,” to paraphrase Schivelbusch, there is a danger that the larger social, cultural, and economic changes that precipitated and that follow the computer’s invention are not considered thoroughly enough. If projects and initiatives proceed instead from a broader historical view, modern digital technologies can be situated within a longer evolution of innovation and change that includes, for example, the invention of photography as well as the train. This kind of approach seems particularly relevant for art history, a discipline that was not only shaped by this evolution but in many ways was born of it.

While the invention of photography made distanced viewing of art objects easier and more accessible, train travel allowed more people to view art objects in situ. These two technologies not only facilitated more widespread engagement with art, they also made art history as a discipline possible, allowing for its development on a scale beyond that of small groups of connoisseurs and collectors. The fundamental connection between art history and technological innovation has been documented by scholars.20 Even so, there are fewer examples of projects or scholarship that explore the mutual influence of technology and art history in more detail. Among these are the initiatives associated with Pharos, a consortium of art-historical photo archives, including the PhotoTech project of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), and Mapping Senufo, a collaborative project led by art historians Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Constantine Petridis that examines the artistic production of the region and people commonly designated by the term Senufo.

The consortium of art-historical photo archives called Pharos was formed in 2011 with the goal of bringing renewed attention to the research value of historic photo archives.21 Photo archives contain photographic reproductions of works of art and for decades were one of the most important tools for the study of art history.22 Within Pharos are represented some of the field’s oldest and most influential photo archives, including the collections of key figures in the development of the discipline such as Bernard Berenson (Villa I Tatti, Florence), Aby Warburg (The Warburg Institute, London), and Erwin Panofsky (GRI, Los Angeles). The fourteen institutions represented in Pharos seek to digitize a significant portion of their holdings and make the resulting corpus freely available for study and research. In working together in a consortium, these institutions also collaborate and share best practices for the digitization of photo archives and for the research on the resulting digital image corpora.

I am involved in the GRI’s effort to digitize and make its own photo archive available, in part through the Pharos platform. This project, called PhotoTech, includes a research initiative designed to explore a series of questions: What roles have technologies of reproduction played in, for example, the formation of the art-historical canon or biases toward Renaissance art and more specifically painting? How might digital technologies of image production but also distribution be shaping the field in fundamental ways?23 We are interested in ways to explore the historical and historiographic influence of photo archives on the practice of art history and formation of the discipline. We are equally interested in how contemporary technologies of image analysis, such as computer vision, may be leveraged to shape current and future art-historical practices. By exploring the potentials and the limitations of computer vision in the context of the art-historical photo archive, we are able to situate our examination of this approach in the longer history of reproductive imaging technologies. As a result, our project constitutes an investigation less of technology than of visual analysis, a category that includes direct observation as well as the kinds of facilitated viewing enabled by cameras and computers.

Mapping Senufo is similar in that it both uses and interrogates the use of a particular practice: mapping. With their research, Gagliardi and Petridis seek to interrogate the appellation “Senufo,” a term coined by Europeans that is used to refer to a set of West African places, people, and objects but which they argue is problematic in its evocation of a singular, ahistorical, and “timeless” cultural or ethnic group (“Mapping Senufo,” 136). The scholars frame their project through mapping as a literal and conceptual practice, attempting to expose the impossibility of truly locating so-called Senufo objects and people in ways that both acknowledge colonial paradigms while resisting them. Instead of traditional, positivist maps, for example, Gagliardi and Petridis have instead focused on creating spatial representations of individual data elements to create visualizations that would challenge the notion of a single, discrete “Senufo.” “Through its emphasis on specific details,” argues Gagliardi, “Mapping Senufo aims to fill an intellectual void, unsettle colonial assumptions, and assess African arts with a rigor and attention to detail that parallels the rigor and attention to detail that scholars have used to study arts of Europe” (“Mapping Senufo,” 136).

Mapping Senufo is an art-historical project focused on an examination of the power structures of art history—the system of galleries and museums, curators, collectors, auction houses, universities—as well as the structures of European economic and cultural power, including the art market and the act of mapping itself. It is a project that moreover provides a reminder of how entwined these structures are, as evidenced by the activities of particular collectors, colonialists, gallerists, and museum curators who created the concept of “Senufo” for particular reasons. Mapping Senufo thus provides a model for the engagement with data—museum collections data, for example, or linguistic data—that does not ignore the power structures that produced that data, that created the systems used to manage and express it, and that instrumentalized it. Gagliardi and Petridis’s search for collections that contained objects labeled “Senufo,” for example, led to a reflection on museum cataloguing practices, the slippery nature of data and description, and how something like cataloguing can both derive from and perpetuate colonial agendas (“Mapping Senufo,” 144). Mapping Senufo is thus not only a project that employs particular technology tools, but one that examines the larger cultural, social, and economic forces that have driven technological innovation, both before and since the arrival of personal computing and the internet. As Gagliardi and Petridis’s project demonstrates, exposing the larger forces that shape technological innovation and are influenced by it is a critical part of developing a more inclusive, more globally oriented art history.

In a 2016 interview on the digital humanities for the Los Angeles Review of Books, media critic Alexander Galloway argues that “there is one approach, which investigates the nature of letters and numbers, and there is another approach, which focuses on the use of letters and numbers for other ends” (italics in original), concluding, “I think most of [digital humanities] has been the latter” (Dinsman). Projects like Mapping Senufo and PhotoTech seek both to use technology and to investigate its nature. Art historians should initiate more of the kinds of projects that examine the power structures on which the discipline was built and has been maintained for decades. They must acknowledge computing technology as part of the daily practice of art history rather than a mere utility that individual scholars can either embrace or safely disregard. Indeed, one may think that by eschewing the use of computational analysis or engagement with digital humanities, one has shielded oneself from the harmful effects of, for example, neoliberalism, positivism, or the undue influence of corporations. In reality, however, these are phenomena with long histories that have shaped and are shaping all aspects of contemporary academia, including digital humanities but also individual humanities disciplines—art history perhaps more acutely than others.

In her exchange with Drucker, Bishop expresses her interest in “thinking through how the dominance of networked technology, especially Google Images, is exerting its own pressures on the study of art history,” an interest she characterizes as outside the purview of digital humanities or digital art history, as she understands them. In fact, an exploration of the influence of Google Images has the potential to be a meaningful exploration of interest to all art historians, including those who work in the subfield of digital art history, because it addresses both the use digital technologies to conduct research and the standards of practice by which art historians find images more broadly. I could imagine one iteration of such an inquiry in which a scholar investigates the algorithms that drive a Google Image search, how they operate, and the kinds of image corpora that do, or do not, populate the results of such searches. Another scholar might approach the same question by exploring such searches within the longer history of image repositories, exploring the holdings of art-historical photo archives and comparing what a search for Johannes Vermeer’s Lacemaker (ca. 1669) might yield when conducted on Google Images as opposed to one conducted on site in the photo archive of the Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD.

There is a need for all art historians to engage critically with issues related to technological change and innovation in ways that are rooted in broad disciplinary concerns. The study of the role of technologies and their historical formation, and their influence on the development and practice of art history; the development of methods and best practices that leverage digital technologies to improve existing and establish emerging art-historical practices and outcomes to make them more critically relevant, efficient, and sustainable; and the investigation of how and when the management of art-historical information intersects with or influences the production of art-historical knowledge—these are all areas of concern for the entirety of art history, even if they might be associated with the scholars who identify themselves with digital art history in particular. As Ulrich Pfisterer has noted, “the need for critical self-reflection on forms of representation and the conditions of visual knowledge production in the digital domain [is] a bridge that art history could and should help build” (136).

Engaging in a critical discourse that strengthens the connections between art history and digital art history, in part by identifying areas of shared concern, would create a discipline of scholars who are prepared to conduct research and produce scholarship in the already-digital world of the twenty-first century. Such a discourse would produce a broad-based critical engagement with technologies and technological change that would productively advance both digital humanities and art history alike.

Notes

The ideas in this text were shaped in direct and indirect ways through conversations and collaborations with colleagues over the past several years at the Getty Research Institute and beyond. In particular, Elizabeth Mansfield and Tracy Stuber have served as thoughtful and generous interlocutors around the issues I present here and also offered comments on various drafts. My thanks and appreciation go also to my fellow authors Kate Elswit, Anastasia Salter, and Abraham Gibson, who provided feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. Finally, I am grateful to Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein for their incredibly helpful attentive and insightful critiques on the text, as well as their guidance throughout the editorial process.

1. Baca and Helmreich; Baca, Helmreich, and Gill, “Digital Art History,” 1–5; Drucker; Fletcher; Zorich. Fletcher’s 2015 article marked the inauguration of the review of projects and publications related to digital art history in the caa.reviews, a publication of the discipline’s professional organization, the College Art Association.

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2. I cite the International Journal for Digital Art History version of Bishop’s essay throughout.

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3. See also Cordell; Sayers. Both are accessible at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016.

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4. Some examples are “Digital Karnak” (UCLA, https://humtech.ucla.edu/project/digital-karnak/), “Digital Mellini” (see Baca, “Digital Mellini”), “Digital Serlio” (Columbia University, https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/avery/digitalserlio.html), “Digital Silk Road” (National Institute of Informatics Tokyo, http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/), and “Digital Thoreau” (SUNY Geneseo, https://digitalthoreau.org/).

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5. Bishop repeatedly uses the ambiguous term “DH projects” in her exchange with Drucker (see Drucker and Bishop).

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6. For example, an early influential article in this field looked at class and committees in a small community in Bremnes, Norway. See Barnes; see also Mitchell.

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7. This binary understanding is undoubtedly the legacy, at least in part, of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis.

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8. Claire Bishop’s “Against Digital Art History” is one example of such a critique, as are articles like Stephen Marche’s “Literature Is Not Data.” In addition, in her conversation with Johanna Drucker, Bishop maintains that “DH projects” are “driven by technophilic rather than intellectual questions” (Drucker and Bishop).

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9. Zorich’s 2012 report introduced the notion that “there is a pervasive sense that the discipline is too cautious, moves too slowly, and has to ‘catch up’ in the digital arena” (20). This idea has since become accepted as fact, repeated, for example, in the 2014 Ithaka S+R report (and in a related article in the journal Art Documentation), the 2015 introductory text authored by David Raskin for Fletcher’s “Reflections on Digital Art History,” and the editors’ introduction to the 2019 special issue of Visual Resources on digital art history. See Long and Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians,” 6; Long and Schonfeld, “Preparing for the Future of Research Services for Art History”; Raskin; Baca, Helmreich, and Gill, 2.

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10. Other scholars have made similar arguments in connection with digital humanities. For example, in their introduction to Bodies of Information, Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh write that “the digital humanities should also advocate attention to technosocial environments, the interfaces and platforms of mediation, and the procedures, protocols, and platforms of playable systems.” See also Berens and Sanders.

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11. Bishop remarks, “I feel bad about paying students to do mindless data entry rather than more exploratory intellectual work” (Drucker and Bishop).

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12. See also Loukissas; Rawson and Muñoz.

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13. See “school of” as described in the section “4.1 Creator Description” in Baca and Harpring.

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14. See, for example, Cohen.

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15. See Baca, “Getty Voices: Rethinking Art History.”

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16. See Pugh.

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17. For an excellent overview of the kinds of issues that are excluded when one removes topics like digitization from a conception of digital art history or digital humanities, see Chapter 2, “All the Work You Do Not See,” by Smith and Whearty.

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18. See Batchen; Daston and Galison; or Galassi.

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19. See Bishop; Drimmer; and Pollock.

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20. In addition to Schivelbusch’s book on train travel and Nelson’s essay on the slide lecture, see Bohrer. See also Berenson. Many proponents of digital art history argue that the use of technology in art-historical research is “not really a new phenomenon,” citing the work of Father Roberto Busa or Jules Prown’s use of a computer in support of his study of John Singleton Copley’s patrons. Baca, Helmreich, and Gill, “Digital Art History,” 1. See also Baca and Helmreich; Drucker et al., 7; and Zweig.

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21. A description of Pharos and a full listing of its members, which includes my own institution, is on the consortium’s website at http://pharosartresearch.org/.

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22. For an in-depth account of photo archives and their history, see Caraffa.

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23. For a longer description of the research aims and methodologies associated with Pharos, see Caraffa et al.

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