Author: Kat Cardullo

This week, we took a more critical look at the process of discovery in collections and what methods are being tested to make it easier to find things in databases of visual information. It was interesting to look at collection access from a user experience design point of view; facilitating use of the materials is what I believe the core function of any collection should be, but often it is swept to the side with the assumption that anyone who gets as far as your search bar already knows exactly what they are looking for. This problem is often further exacerbated by the complexities of searching for images, whose indexing relies almost exclusively on the information found in their metadata. For example, if you were trying to trace the origin of the pigeon-breast silhouette of early 1900s women’s clothing, there is a slim chance that searching “pigeon breast” would bring up every example of this silhouette in a textile collection. In order for a catalog entry to show up with that search term, its cataloger would have needed to add those words to its description in some shape or form via tags, subject headings, or plain-text description. This is where semantic searching comes in, which requires some level of cultural understanding of a query on the part of an information retrieval system and not just simple 1:1 text matching. Unfortunately, while many commercial search engines utilize this function, not many search algorithms in collections management software are advanced enough to do so. 

We looked at two projects in particular that took a machine learning/neural network approach to ameliorating some of these difficulties: “Training the Archive” and IMGS.AI. Both projects center on the central idea of clustering as a form of determining relevance, which they are able to do via image recognition tools that can pull out details such as color, shape, and other purely visual features. To be quite frank, I was not very impressed with the use cases of either of these methodologies. Both projects identify the need for a method of determining visual similarity in search that does not necessarily rely on metadata, and I do agree that this is especially true for large volumes of images, but in my opinion the question of “what can we do with AI tools” seems to have taken precedent over “what problems are people actually having while navigating databases.” IMGS.AI uses sound information retrieval theory with a clever way of instantaneously incorporating user evaluation, but in practice, its interface is highly unclear and essentially amounts to a “hot or cold” game with the database. “Training the Archive” uses a similar clustering system to replicate the knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities of a curator, and while it is true that it was able to pick out some stylistically similar images, I think it’s a bit bold to jump to the claim that it has the potential to become “The Unbiased Curator’s Machine.” It’s an interesting thought experiment, but a very loaded way to present a tool that has its own set of problems with real-world consequences.

The project I thought was most successful was Mitchell Whitelaw’s “generous interface” for the Australian Prints and Printmaking database. With options for guided browsing and search, there are many different entry points into the same collection. In particular, I thought the subjects explorer was a fantastic visualizer for similarity that made image metadata abundantly clear in its interface. The more related a topic was, the more saturated it appears in the sidebar menu, making it very easy to jump between subjects and filter down results. While it requires structured inputs and may not be as flexible as the previous examples, I think the ultimate result is much more navigable and offers more utility to the way people are actually searching and browsing for materials.

I wish more repositories had a way to visualize links between people, organizations, topics, and collections that was so simple to use! The downside to this approach though, as with many tools that yield exciting results, is that it is highly labor intensive and that labor is practically invisible. For each of the 40,000+ works in this collection, each one already had clear, structured metadata with those links between artists and works already established. This is fantastic for a small to mid-sized collection such as this, but this process must be nearly impossible to scale (in a timely manner) for large institutions. For example, the collections I work with at the City of Raleigh currently number at over 35,000+ items accumulated since 1992. I can say from experience that I am constantly updating old descriptions, adding tags and subject headings, creating new scans and photos, and measuring objects in the collection, and there are still at least hundreds of subpar catalog entries that would lead researchers directly into dead ends. And that is just the size of a small local history museum- the North Carolina Museum of History has over 150,000 items in its collection, and huge institutions like the Smithsonian have millions. The sheer amount of labor required to standardize that volume of data is truly astronomical, and I’m not sure how we can create that level of utility and simplicity without either massive funding or the exploitation of GLAM workers- either directly or by training new tools on their work. 

I’ll admit, when searching for more collections interfaces to explore, I had a difficult time finding one to share! Not many had very robust exploration options, and most limited browsing to a collection-by-collection basis. I ended up looking at the collections website for the Indianapolis Museum of Art (my hometown art museum as a child), and found it to be pretty intuitive for browsing. On the landing page, there’s an assortment of featured works along with links for popular searches. I hadn’t seen a museum site that had that feature or that exact wording before, but it shows that they have a knowledge of what bridges already exist between their audience and their collection and a desire to encourage those bridges.

There are also easily accessible sections that show only open access or public domain images. The catalog is extremely clear about copyright, which can be so helpful. Often there is just a vague “the creator owns this” statement on catalog entries that is baked into cataloging systems.

I also appreciated that you can view past exhibitions from an exhaustive list, and that all works from the exhibition are represented. Most recent exhibition collections also have images of all of the works used where copyright allows, and catalog entries for every image contain information about its copyright. I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect interface, but it does have some pretty solid methods of exploration.

Bönisch, Dominik. “The Curator’s Machine: Clustering of Museum Collection Data through Annotation of Hidden Connection Patterns between Artworks.” International Journal for Digital Art History, no. 5 (2020): 5.20-5.35. https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2020.5.75953.

Offert, Fabian, and Peter Bell. “IMGS.AI.: A Multimodal Search Engine for Digital Art History.” International Journal for Digital Art History, no. 9 (2023): 5.28-5.39. https://doi.org/10.11588/dahj.2023.9.91295.

Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 009, no. 1 (2015).

This week’s readings and activities were right up my alley- ever since beginning my career transition to cultural heritage four years ago as a volunteer cataloging and digitizing local history, the question of whether or not surrogates are effective has been a pressing question to me. As someone who also has a hefty background in more technical image processing as a compositor, the bits and bytes we use to represent ourselves, our stories, and our society have certainly framed a lot of the ways that I approach cultural heritage. To create, in one form or another, is to abstract. But how many layers of abstraction and how many copies of copies can exist before they become something different altogether? It’s quite a philosophical topic, and Emma Stanford’s article “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates” did a fantastic job in laying out the points of interest in this discussion succinctly. 

Of course, no conversation about representation of an original is complete without at least acknowledging Walter Benjamin. The conversation of how accurate a surrogate could possibly be has its genesis in the advent of the publicly accessible camera; now that any person can capture an accurate image, what purpose does the original serve? Benjamin’s response (the concept of “aura”) points to the unique physicality of viewing originals, and nearly a hundred years later, we still unequivocally prefer to see the original, regardless of medium. Stanford, however, classifies this as a fundamental (if common) misunderstanding of what the purpose of a surrogate for an art object is. It is neither “a perfect substitute or […] a threat to the original’s authenticity”: It is a tool for delivering a singular perspective of a three-dimensional object, which comes with its own set of pros and cons. As we move beyond simple 2D recreations of objects and into the realm of more advanced digital surrogates (such as the parallax viewer tool created by the Victoria and Albert museum that we explored in class), these questions are pushed back to the forefront of the field. Whether or not more advanced surrogates will actually advance the study of art history seems to be the focus of exploration in this course.

Stanford also touches on something absolutely vital to the creation of advanced surrogates for long-term use: longevity. From an archival standpoint, we have been inundated since day one with the mantra “the archivist is not neutral,” and the same goes for collecting institutions of all kinds. What gets saved, acquired, processed, and made accessible is a slice of a slice of a slice of the overall experience of humanity. I’ve always appreciated Michelle Caswell’s quote, “Not all events ­are recorded; not all records ­are incorporated into archives; not all archives ­are used to tell stories; not all stories are used to write history. Power is implicated in each of these moments; which stories get told, which get for­got­ten, when, and by whom, is inextricably linked ­to the power to tell and to remain silent.” The introduction of power into the equation makes these choices of what and how to digitize that much more pressing and complex. When we take into account the resources necessary to maintain surrogates long-term, this problem further devolves into a case of the haves and have-nots. So, from step zero, there is a massive amount of push and pull from external sources that clouds our ability to answer the question of efficacy. Stafford also echoed a sentiment that anyone who has ever worked with digital objects of any kind has encountered; the tools are arbitrary, and it is the fundamental way of approaching a specific problem that ultimately determines how successful the result will be. 

In taking the time to explore what it takes to make a clean, high-quality, and accessible static digital image, we got to experience first-hand how some of these small decisions quickly shape the experience of the surrogate’s viewer. I brought in a book I purchased for an art history course nearly a decade ago titled The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 because I was kind of tickled by the idea of reproducing an image from an era focused on what it means to reproduce, re-contextualize, and re-appropriate an image. I scanned a page with one of Barbara Kruger’s untitled works from 1981 (Your gaze hits the side of my face) printed on it, and got to see firsthand what was lost in the interaction. For instance, when on exhibit, the work is placed in a frame painted bright red- her signature accent color for this era of her work. The frame’s vibrancy only partially made it into the image in the book, and when scanning the image in the book, the stark red border was only further diminished by my (somewhat rushed) cropping job. Frames are such a large part of presentation, and Stanford even describes them in the article as a context clue for the larger meaning of a work. Sure, it’s just a thin, red border, but red is such a prominent part of Kruger’s visual language and seeing it get smaller and smaller in this exercise made me a little sad! Some artifacting from the book’s printing was also included in the scan; there is an inherent graininess to the work, but this scan overly exaggerates its texture. I played around with frequency separation (a retouching method used often for skin in beauty photography) as a method of reducing texture, but ultimately found that separating the grain of the image from the grain of the book’s printing to be nearly impossible. 

I was, however, much more satisfied with the scans for two additional items that I brought in to compare how digitizing printed and original works differed. The postcard I brought, which was another printed material, had a similar result as far as added texture and graininess. In this case though, the artifacting present is much more in keeping with the nature of a cheaply printed souvenir photo postcard. I also know for a fact that many, many photos have been taken of this exact angle of downtown over the years (I’ve encountered many a Raleigh skyline postcard in my years with the City’s special collections), so the “aura” of the photo and of the original view feels less important in the digital reproduction from my perspective. I was also quite happy with how the scan of my linocut print (one of my very first) turned out. As a print, which is technically another type of “copy,” I feel like this surrogate comes pretty close to the original intent for the viewing of this work, and I felt a lot more confident being able to edit it myself to fit that view. I wonder if in today’s age, digital reproductions (from living artists, at least) are best obtained from the artist themselves? I think if artists were included in the determination of a “particular interpretation” of their work, as Stanford describes, it would be more accurate; the idea of digital surrogates suddenly becomes much more feasible for artists currently working.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–251. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Caswell, Michelle. “Archiving the unspeakable : Silence, memory, and the photographic record in Cambodia.” University of Wisconsin Press. 2014
Stanford, Emma. “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, 1st ed., edited by Kathryn Brown. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505188-19.

In his article “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods,” Paul B. Jaskot outlines the ways in which he believes digital methodologies could alter how art historians frame their questions and offers some examples of what new frameworks could result from the usage of digital tools. Jaskot doesn’t just ask the question, “How can we use digital art history methods to support current research methods?” but goes further to ask, “How can digital art history as a methodology change the nature of the field?” He begins his article by placing digital art history in the context of critical art history by first addressing that in order for digital art history (and digital humanities in general) to thrive, it cannot be ignored that digital tools have often been the product of profit-seeking corporations. If we are to look at digital art history as a new methodology, we must acknowledge that we are beginning with a set of tools and frameworks that have roots in white, male, wealthy, Euro-centric perspectives. Jaskot uses this as a transition to his main argument that digital art history methods are uniquely positioned to analyze a much larger swath of society beyond dominant narratives, allowing bulk data to tell a story rather than granular interpretation of objects. A particularly salient point made is the vital difference between “digitized” and “digital” art history; Jaskot points to Johanna Drucker’s essay “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?” as the origin of this line of thinking, but ultimately finds that Drucker is still viewing digital art history as an extension of traditional art history frameworks and methodologies. To Jaskot, this is still a digitized point of view rather than a digital one, and in response he calls for a more nuanced analysis of the interplay of art historians’ tools, methods, and topics that ideally moves away from single-object focused meaning-making and into a wider analysis. Ultimately, Jaskot is advocating for using the disruption caused in the field by digital tools as an occasion for a more critical re-examination of current art historical research, allowing new questions and connections to be developed in conjunction with new high-capacity digital research methods.

In his current research, Jaskot uses the method of visualization to more critically examine cultural forces at work in his area of study. The project he discusses in this article that supports this use of wider frameworks for meaning-making was one that he published with Ivo Van Der Graaff, titled, “Historical Journals as Digital Sources: Mapping Architecture in Germany, 1914–24.” Jaskot uses some of the final resulting maps generated from this project in his article on digital art history to touch on one instance in which large-scale analysis can be more successful at illustrating relationships and their interplay with overarching social structures. His work is uniquely posed to explore wide-scale geographic visualizations; as a scholar of German architecture in the early to mid 20th century, he often focuses on Nazi Germany and the ways in which construction was used to enact violence. This topic is so embroiled in place and imperialist expansion,and benefits from the opportunity to impart scale visually. In his mapping project, he and his co-author Van Der Graaff had the goal of analyzing whether the process of construction itself was meaningful in the larger social and cultural landscape of Germany at this time. They describe the role of social art history in this process as “[…] not to explain a few monuments but—through a focus on what was built, where, and when—to increase our knowledge about the very social structures in which architects and buildings dynamically participate.” Van Der Graaff and Jaskot’s usage of tools in this case also provides an excellent example of the fundamental shifts in question-asking and meaning-making that Jaskot refers to in his article; rather than interpreting a topic through the lens of “great men” or overarching movements, they were able to look at construction as an expression of systemic changes.

I found this article to be an illuminating introduction to digital art history as a practice; it gives a clear idea of what makes digital humanities research different from current mindsets around sociocultural research. One of the reasons I chose to delve into Jaskot’s research a little further was because it truly is a compelling use case for digital art history methods that addresses how we can best utilize the absolute dearth of information that exists in repositories worldwide. The idea of “bulk” associated with digital records can often be framed as a challenge for archivists, and as a special collections worker who has studied archival theory, it was honestly slightly refreshing to see a researcher take that idea and put a more positive spin on it. Every record is a potentiality; having many records to comb through for relevant information forces creativity in their navigation. He also touches on some foundational appraisal theory with the line, “[…] more data does not equal more truth.” This resonated with me, and clarified Jaskot’s point that research (and especially digital methods of conveying research) is not necessarily a definitive statement, but an illustration of a specific web of relationships. The goal of creating a GIS map system such as this is not to lay bare the political and cultural landscape of Nazi Germany, but to illustrate patterns that may indicate connections between historical context and architectural form. This push and pull between retaining the characteristics of individual objects while at the same time examining their context in a wider system is certainly a tension more easily explored through digital tools that have fewer restraints on form. However, I would be curious to hear more about Jaskot’s opinion on how spatial analysis and social network analysis have facilitated the most “productive questions” of the four methodological areas he lists. “Digital storytelling” is a very wide and somewhat general description of a methodology with what seems like the capability to encourage more laypeople to engage with critical art history thought, and I would be interested in hearing about why exactly Jaskot has chosen not to examine this methodology further. Although, I will grant that since he is an architectural historian, spatial analysis is a far more natural expression of his research.

Works Referenced

Jaskot, Paul B. “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods.” Visual Resources 35, nos. 1–2 (2019): 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651.

Jaskot, Paul B., and Ivo Van Der Graaff. “Historical Journals as Digital Sources: Mapping Architecture in Germany, 1914–24.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 4 (2017): 483–505.