Author: Caroline Fenstermacher

            Digital collections are one of the most helpful research resources an institution can provide. Coming from the perspective of an art historical researcher, I typically arrive at a museum or cultural institution’s site knowing what I want to see. Not every museum site visitor is conducting research, though, and it is important for institutions’ digital collection searches to accommodate both audiences. Fabian Offert and Peter Bell, Dominik Bonisch, Tim Sherratt, and Mitchell Whitelaw write about new and past digital collections and interfaces that explore the potential of digital resources to effectively organize digital collection to be more user-friendly.

            Sheratt offers examples of how people can creatively use publicly available digital records in his article, “It’s all about the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People.” Written in 2011, Sherratt demonstrates the potential to push digital collections beyond only making them available online. One of his examples is the project “The Real Face of White Australia,” which he uses to explain how digital databases have the ability to turn records from tools of oppression to a restoration of humanity. In the case of “The Real Face of White Australia,” Sherratt and Kate Bagnall used photographs that government officials in the 19^th and 20^th centuries required non-white Australians—which included Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants in addition to indigenous Australians—to submit so that they could re-enter the country if they traveled abroad. Because the National Archives of Australia digitized these records and made them public, Sheratt and Bagnall could use these photographs to create a searchable database and craft biographies for these people to offer a counter-history to the myth of a “White Australia.” This project demonstrated how digital records could be used analytically and to restore marginalized perspectives in history.

            Transitioning from Sherratt’s accounts of early forays into digital collection organization, Bonisch and Offert and Bell report on experiments with generative models to improve the intuitiveness of digital collections through pattern recognition. Bonisch explains an experiment using the massive, digitized collection of the Danish National Statens Museum for Kunst to create a model trained to “think like a curator.” Working in a bottom-up pattern, the artificial intelligence treats each separate piece as its own data point and gradually narrows it down based on similar visual features and metadata. Offert and Bell discuss the use of imgs.ai, an artificial tool also aimed at increasing the browse and searchability of several collections. Although it cannot search across collections, imgs.ai works with a few museums including the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan, and the Getty. This model begins by presenting the viewer with a random series of all the museum’s digitized images. The user can click on an individual image to see more images with similar features. In this way, the model keeps “a human in the loop” in its searches. From Sherratt’s early examples of using digital collections to create interactive, analytical databases, Bonisch, Offert, and Bell take the technology forward another step with generative technology creating and recognizing patterns between images.

            Exploring digital collections is essential for any student of art history. In my experience, the digital collections of the Metropolitan, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rijksmuseum are particularly user-friendly for researchers—especially those that have a very clear idea of what they are looking for. While conducting research for my undergraduate thesis about a wardrobe with German decorative influences, I needed to search the collections of a few Swiss and German museums. From a book detailing the Historisches Museum Basel’s collection, I found the accession number of a wardrobe that I believed would be particularly helpful to include in my work. The collection site proved to be very accurate for finding that particular wardrobe. When I used the keyword “wardrobe” to search for more examples, the results were limited. The case was even more drastic in the collection search for the Bayerisches National Museum. This digital collection could only recognize German words (Fig. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “wardrobe”

Fig. 2: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “schrank“

This small experiment between primarily German collections may only prove my own lingual Anglo-centricity, but it does introduce another challenge to organizing and improving the accessibility of digital collections. Is there a way for metadata attached to images to be easily translated? In a world where digital and online spaces can feasibly grant access to collections from any corner of the globe, will language still be a barrier? Or will tools that primarily use visual features, like imgs.ai, mitigate this problem?

            Digital collections are important for institutions not only for research but to grant accessibility to all. This not only includes academics, but also the casual browser. While collections databases should be able to execute advance search functions, institutions should also provide intuitive and engaging interfaces to browse through. Whitelaw discusses this idea in his article “Generous Interfaces for Digital Collections.” Whitelaw praises the intuitive nature of the Rijksmuseum website and offers a few examples of user-friendly interfaces in Australia including “Discover the Queenslander,” a magazine archive, and “Manly Images,” a series of digitized images in the collection of the Manly Public Library. I think that the Rijksmuseum is also a great example of an institution that balances accurate, thorough, and intuitive search functions with engaging content for the casual browser. Its “Art Explorer” tab is particularly exceptional because it provides prompts to encourage leisurely audiences to interact with its collections. In the future, I think that institutions should look to the Rijksmuseum’s website as an example for both leisurely browsing and detailed searches.

            After this week, I firmly believe that digitized collections should be accessible to academics and general audiences alike. Bonisch and Offert and Bell’s articles highlighted the potential to make digital collections even more user-friendly while Sherratt’s article the great work that digital collections management has already accomplished. Whitelaw emphasized the necessity of “generous” interfaces to de-mystify searches and encourage browsing for general interest. Moving forward, it will be exciting to see—and even participate in—the new methods that institutions will discover to make their collections even more engaging and accessible to the world.

           

I decided to digitize a photograph of my dog, Jax, this past week in Digital Art History. In this educational exercise, I practiced how to properly scan, digitally adjust colors, and write alt text for this digital reproduction of Jax’s photograph. This experience gave me insight—albeit on a micro-scale—of the digitization protocols of museums, libraries, and cultural institutions.

Digitization is a crucial step forward for museums, libraries, and cultural institutions to broaden access to their collections. In the book chapter “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Evaluating and Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource” Emma Standford explains the history, best practices, challenges, and potential of digitization for museums and cultural institutions. Digitizing collections creates the potential for broader access to art, documents, and objects.

Digitization is inherently a surrogate for the original, whether it’s a digital copy of a painting or a digitized photograph of a living, breathing golden retriever. Surrogates are not new to the field of art history. As early as 1890, Herman Grim integrated a lantern slide projector into his lectures, using projected images as surrogates for works of art and architecture.[1] Digitization and digital photography allowed the transition from physical slides to digital projected images in the art history classroom. Even more advanced technology and software development allow for interactive methods of viewing objects or architectural spaces. It is impossible to digitally re-create the experience of viewing an object in-person, but the versatility of digital surrogates also grants viewers access to different methods of interaction with an object.

Digital-storytelling is a popular way to interact with the digital surrogate of an object. It primarily serves an educational purpose. In class we viewed an example of the collaborative software of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIF), the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Compariscope that allows viewers to overlay The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn over the artist’s original sketches. This tool encourages users to study the artist’s process and transition from a first sketch to the final painting. In a previous art history course, I also played with the publicly sponsored “interactive documentary” Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights, which creates an audio-visual experience for the user. [2] It pairs music with specific scenes in Bosch’s triptych, offers explanations for details in the painting, and allows the viewer to closely examine the work. These digital resources are not analytical in nature, but, as digital-storytelling tools, they do help share scholarly research in the classroom and the museum.

            Besides its educational advantages, digitization ultimately improves and broadens access to an institution’s collections. As a student with experience working in archives and special collections libraries, I have participated in digitization projects and witnessed their utility. For example, I scanned large, old, and fragile land survey maps for the Newport Historical Society while working in the Salve Regina University Archives. This project presented a few nuances to digitization that Stanford also elaborates upon in her chapter.

First, the necessity to update and improve the image quality of the digitized maps indicated institutions’ ongoing struggle to keep up with the most current technology. Stanford noted that even since the advent of digital photography, there are clear improvements in image quality from an object digitized twenty years ago and five years ago. [3] I learned that the Newport Historical Society had also already digitized the maps, but the University recently acquired a scanner that could capture significantly more depth per square inch. The Newport Historical Society’s decision to re-scan the maps demonstrated the necessity to maintain and update digital collections as technology improves.

Another factor influencing an institution’s digitization practices is access to the proper technology. In the case of the Newport Historical Society maps, it involved reaching out and collaborating with another institution, the Salve Regina University Archives. This may be an optimal solution for smaller, local institutions, but the wealth and resources available to an institution affects the quantity, quality, and type of objects in a collection that get digitized.

Stanford argues that determining what and how objects or documents are digitized is inherently subjective.[4] Although large institutions may have the financial autonomy to run their own digitization experiments, most non-profit institutions rely on private or corporate donors or grants. This ultimately affects what museums choose to digitize because access to essential funding may be at stake.

            Hans Haacke outlines the precarious position of museums between independence and accountability to donors in the chapter “Museums: Managers of Consciousness” in the book Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum.[5] Haacke explains that museums are inevitably political institutions since they are accountable to those—either through public, government grants or private, corporate sponsorships—that control funding.[6] This makes the operational decisions of museums, like choosing what and how to digitize a collection, dependent on the source of funding for the project. In the case of corporate sponsorships, Haacke considers, museums may face even greater pressure to produce impressive, “box office” exhibitions.[7] This similar self-censorship is also true for digitization projects. Digitization projects, like exhibitions, are stuck between aiming to provide greater access to their collections while also molding projects to fit within a grant’s parameters or to appease a private donor or corporate sponsor.

            Despite digitization’s inherent subjectivity, responsiveness to new technology, and dependence on adequate funding and resources, it is clearly a significant benefit for museums, libraries, and cultural institutions that grew from the rapid technological advancement of the last twenty years. Digitization increases access to art, objects, and documents (and photographs to pets!) while also facilitating the creation of digital humanities projects. The challenges to digitization are great, but the potential for broadened access to collections for research, education, and even just general interest is worth the effort.

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[1] Alison Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018), 2.

[2] Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights (Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR, 2016), https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html#.

[3] Emma Standford, “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. by Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 206.

[4] Standford, “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates,” 205.

[5] Hans Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Routledge, 2020), 400-412.

[6] Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” 407-408.

[7] Haacke, “Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” 409.

Historically, the field of art history is a discipline that uses the most current technology for photo and video projection. Now in the twenty-first century, the rapid innovation of analytical digital tools presents the discipline with the opportunity to integrate these tools into the field’s research methodology. Similar arguments and themes about the nature and future of art history in a digital world are articulated in articles by scholars Harald Klinke, Paul Jaskot, Alison Langmead, and Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund.¹ Aside from the utility of digital methods for art historical analysis, Kelli Marshall and Miriam Posner explain the importance of an academic digital presence and practical suggestions for scholars.² The report compiled in 2014 by Matthew Long and Roger Schonfeld shares current methodological trends and recommendations for art history.³ The combination of these articles, blog articles by Posner and Marshall, and the report by Long and Schonfeld indicate that art history will be indistinguishable from digital art history in the future.

In Harald Klinke’s article, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” he seeks to define digital art history and asserts that it will become more than another method, but redefine the field of art history itself.⁴ He introduces the idea of “distant viewing,” a method of examination that involves analyzing large quantities of images, that will make digital methods an essential part of the research process.⁵ This process takes into account not just “masterworks” but also “lesser” works that fall short of high volumes of scholarly analysis. Digital methods, Klinke asserts, allow a macro-analysis that facilitates art historical analysis. Klinke indicates how these methods are changing the field’s curricula, role of the teacher, the department, and the discipline as a whole.⁶ Klinke believes that art history should adapt to accommodate these changes by including software and digital resource instruction in the curriculum. With this mode of instruction, the teacher transforms into a guide, and the department must intentionally create spaces for collaboration. This transition into a digital space allows for greater transdisciplinary collaboration.

Similar concepts of transdisciplinary collaboration, digital methods for macro-analysis, and the necessity to create shared spaces for collaboration are also present in the articles by Jaskot and Langmead. Jaskot theorizes in his article “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” that digital methods can help analyze the relationships between art and society.⁷ He writes that through network and spatial analysis of large quantities of data, reminding the reader of Klinke’s concept of “distance-viewing,” patterns can be illuminated to provide evidence for scholars’ claims. Klinke outlines four areas that digital methods are helpful to the study of art history: digital storytelling, text-based approaches, network analysis, and spatial analysis.⁸ He gives preference to network and spatial analysis as methods that present the greatest potential for productive scholarly analysis. Jaskot writes that macro-analysis necessitates collaboration, a conclusion reached by Klinke and Langmead.⁹

In her article, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Langmead explains that the humanities should not take innovations in technology for granted but instead continually engage with them. She points to the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop as an exemplary instance of productive engagement with technology and scholarly collaboration.¹⁰ Throughout her article, she traces the history of technology in the field of art history and asserts that a part of it is theatrical, like Wölflinn’s performance-like lectures in the late 19th-century.¹¹ While art history may have lost the social opportunity presented with the physical slide library in the digital age, Langmead explains that the University of Pittsburgh’s Visual Media Workshop is an example of a productive blend of scholarly collaboration and meaningful, analytical engagement with new digital resources.

Wasielewski and Näslund’s article, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” moves beyond defining digital art history and seeks to critically examine how digital tools have inevitably permeated the field.¹² Wasielewski and Näslund apply principles of critical theory to art history by looking inwards to be methodologically self-critical and to examine the social and political conditions of the external environment from the researcher’s subjective perspective.¹³ The authors also introduce the concept of the post-digital world, one that is inextricably linked to the digital sphere.¹⁴ Like Jaskot, Langmead, and Klinke, Wasielewski and Näslund outline the numerous ways in which scholars’ research inevitably uses digital tools to find sources, read, write, and collaborate with other scholars. Although digital practices may resign the scholar to the stereotype of the “isolated” researcher, a negative trend of the advent of the digital world that Langmead also refers to, digital resources open the field to wider audiences and present greater opportunities for collaboration.¹⁵

The report compiled by Long and Schonfeld examines the challenges and opportunities of the field of art history and offers practical recommendations to progress forward.¹⁶ The report, compiled over ten years ago, already found that art historians’ research unavoidably involves the internet and digital resources from primary and secondary source collection to compiling digital images for research. In its conclusion, Long and Schonfeld note that the methods and practices of art history research will increasingly rely on digital resources.¹⁷
Aside from the methodological application of digital resources, Marshall and Posner’s articles, written in a more conversational style, indicate the increasing necessity for academics to create and control their own digital presence.¹⁸ Both authors offer their own advice for maintaining an online presence specifically for academic professionals. Marshall suggests creating a website and building a social network while maintaining a consistent professional branding of oneself across these platforms, and Posner offers similar suggestions.¹⁹ These methods establish and protect the reputation of the academic professional.

After reading these materials, I noticed that my research and scholarly practice exists almost entirely within the digital space, but I do not use these resources beyond a more efficient substitute for notebooks and slides. Langmead’s article about using digital resources beyond reproductions of images made me reflect on ways that I could also incorporate macro-analysis or distance-viewing practices facilitated by digital resources that Klinke and Jaskot discussed in their respective articles. Marshall and Posner’s articles also made me consider my academic digital presence beyond personal connections. By standardizing my profile between my website and LinkedIn account, I hope to begin establishing my presence online as an academic. These articles indicate that digital resources will become essential to research methodology in the field of art history.

Notes
¹ Harald Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” in Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. Kathryn Brown (Routledge, 2020), 32-42.
Paul B. Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Visual Resources 35:1-2 (2019), 21-33.
Alison Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 12 (February 2018).
Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” in Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, ed. Amanda Wasiewleski and Anna Näslund  (Intellect, 2024), 1-19.
² Kelli Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May 5, 2015).
Miriam Posner, “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics,” ProfHacker (February 14, 2011).
³ Matthew Long and Roger C. Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians” (Ithaka S+R, 2014).
⁴ Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 32.
⁵ Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 34.
⁶  Klinke, “The Digital Transformation of Art History,” 36-38.
⁷ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 23, 30.
⁸ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 24.
⁹ Jaskot, “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” 26.
¹⁰ Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 18.
¹¹  Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 4-5.
¹² Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 2.
¹³ Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 4-5.
¹⁴ Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 5.
¹⁵ Langmead, “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities,” 18.
Wasielewski and Näslund, “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction,” 13.
¹⁶ Long and Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians,” 42-47.
¹⁷ Long and Schonfeld, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians,” 50.
¹⁸ Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic.”
Posner, “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics.”
¹⁹ Marshall, “How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic.”