I spent two weeks this summer participating in Rebuilding the Portfolio, an introductory digital humanities workshop for art historians sponsored by the Getty Foundation and held by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. After two intense weeks that one of my colleagues nicknamed “DH bootcamp,” I returned to work eager to implement some of the things I had learned. So here are some thoughts now that the fall semester has begun and I have time to evaluate where I am in terms of practicing digital art history.

Public Scholarship

Ha! I have been so busy getting my syllabus and sakai site together for my fall course in modern architecture, as well as performing departmental service in the form of updating art.unc.edu to reflect all of our upcoming fall activities, add new faculty members and staff to the website, and post news about everyone else’s busy summers, that I haven’t really found the time to figure out when and how and what public engagement will look like for me. So this is what I have done so far:

  1. I organized my Twitter feed using Tweetdeck, which has been very illuminating and helped me keep the flow of information in some more tidy categories, including #digitalhumanities and #doingdah2014 as well as inspirational tech and GLAM feeds. As a result, I have tweeted and retweeted to keep relevant dah news stories, gained followers, crossposted things that I have discovered from other dh and daher’s to the vrl facebook page (and picked up some more facebook followers too!), and in general feel like I am now a part of the digital humanities conversation on Twitter, where so much important news and information gets shared.
  2. As you can see from the date of the previous blog post compared to this one, I have not been quite so active on my new website. Okay, so for a week my website was suspended by ICANN because they couldn’t verify my email and it took a while to figure out that the extremely antihacking security-conscious spam settings on my university-based email account kept garbage-binning their confirmation requests and giving me no way to see or retrieve them to fix the problem. Asked for help on Twitter (again, yay!) and in an hour knew that changing my email address associated with the website was the answer. But I can’t say I have been proactive in fleshing out the website or making time in my schedule to write regular blog posts. My goal from today is to write something relevant to dah, art history, or my teaching every other Tuesday.
  3. Art History-related aside here: I am really struggling with what the “look and feel” or “brand” of my website should be. So many themes! So many visual styles! Add images, colors, boxes, and more! When I was in graduate school, I worked for an ad agency, managing accounts’ trade show events, which included working with the agency art director on messaging; currently I manage the art department website (also on WordPress), for which purpose I have read many texts on promotion, marketing, and how to engage with the public on the internet; and I spend an awful lot of time in my classes making the argument that the visual matters in our everyday lives. At the moment I feel paralyzed by something that should be so easy (and to all of the bloggers I follow, whether in the GLAM world or in theater or in crafting, congratulations on solving the basic problem of how to communicate your identity clearly on a website because that takes a lot of work!). For now, I will probably try on many identities, themes, etc. as I try to also figure out what being a publicly engaged digital art historian means for me.
  4. I don’t have a scholarly project to develop, discuss, share, or otherwise make public. The project I thought I wanted to do (censorship and film) is perhaps not what I need to do right now. And I have just become involved in a new GLAM-related project about which I cannot yet speak publicly as it hasn’t been officially announced. Right away, logistical constraints appeared which have nothing to do with my desire to engage publicly.

Pedagogy

On this front, I have been more immediately successful and exciting things are happening!

  1. I have changed the syllabus for the modern architecture course to incorporate a digital project this semester. Student evaluations have in the past revealed that, while students enjoy the course and actually seem to like the writing project, they hate exams that are based on rote-memorization and the spitting out of the appropriate vocabulary. And yet, since there is not a more introductory architecture course as a prerequisite to mine, I need for them to learn and retain basic facts about modern architects and their built works. So, to approach that goal digitally, the course will instead of exams be undertaking a two-part project which will a) map the architects and identified built works from the textbook, William J.R. Curtis’ Modern Architecture since 1900 and b) research and map modernist women architects’ built works on top of the first map, which we will then compare and discuss as a group in class. Win-win. The students get to engage with creating digitally rather than just consuming digitally, and in the process the basic facts of architects and built works will be better retained because of how the students had to engage with the source material. I will post updates on this course project as the semester goes along.
  2. I have consulted with a colleague in the department about supporting a digital project in her fall course where students will be trained to use a Gigapan camera mount to make and then stitch together Gigapixel images of a work or works in the Ackland Museum. This will be a collaboration between the Sloane Art Library (who own the Gigapan mount and necessary tripod), the VRL (where the Gigapan Stitch software will be learned and then used to make the final images) and the Ackland Museum (who will be providing the objects and the space in their digitization lab for the photographing of those objects). This will also result in a presentation on the project to the Art Department as well as in the new UNC Libraries Research Hub. Cross-campus connections are being forged.
  3. I have surprised my colleagues and myself by producing and submitting a fully-fleshed out syllabus for a digital art history graduate-level course in the department, to be taught in the fall of 2015 if approved. This became an urgent necessity after the departure of a colleague in the School of Information and Library Science for the University of Maryland and the disappearance of his digital humanities course with him–this course had been much-utilized by our dual degree Art History MA/Library Science MLS program and had even been approved to cross-count for said degree so that the students would have at least 3 options to fill the 2 cross-counting requirements. I was already going to urge the creation of a digital art history course after seeing how effectively digital humanities had been integrated into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum at GMU, and also to convert my former practice of one-on-one digital training with highly-motivated graduate students in the VRL into something more formal and consistent and available to many more of the students. Thanks to the openness of my departmental colleagues who shared their methods syllabi, and to the dh community for sharing so many syllabi online, I was able to create a draft syllabus for “alt-Methods: Digital Art History” in a little over two weeks. And of course I will share in turn once the course has been approved. This is one reason why the censorship and film project has been paused, since I did not make any more progress on the syllabus proposal for the course that would be connected to that project.

Miscellaneous

The VRL will be undergoing a (slow) makeover this year, as slide cabinets and slides move into storage, a big projection screen gets installed on one wall, and space is opened up for our current assortment of computers and equipment to be utilized for more training and digital project support. And, something I have little to do with but am excited about and hope to participate in, a Maker space is coming to the basement of the Hanes Art Center to add to the digital project possibilities for studio art, art history and other interested campus users.

I apologize for the lengthy, wordy, and very non-visual post–catching up after so many weeks of not managing to blog. And there will be visuals next time!