Author: Kathryn Spears' Work

6 September 2026

It is no surprise that the global rise of the Internet since the late 1990s has ushered in the era of online, digitized collections from art museums around the world. From the expansive collections housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris to the comparatively smaller collections housed at institutions such as the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC, art museums have increasingly digitized their collections to make them more accessible to the public. But are these collections really more accessible? Who is the “public” that are using these online collections? Are some collections more accessible to members of the public with a higher prior knowledge of art and art history than others?

For this week’s blog post, I am going to take a deep-dive into Michael Whitelaw’s “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections”¹, a 2015 article that examines the user interfaces (UI) of various online digital collections for usability. More specifically, I will examine a handful of online collections in 2026 using the same metrics Whitelaw uses in determining the user-friendliness of his chosen collections. 

At the conclusion of the article, Whitelaw supports what he refers to as “generous spaces” in UI design, defining them as providing “rich, navigable representations of large digital collections; they invite exploration and support browsing, using overviews to establish context and maintain orientation while revealing detail at multiple scales.”² In other words, the most effective digital collections are paired with UIs that are a middle-ground for scholarly research and casual browsing. Generous spaces are ones that prioritize both collection search-ability and spontaneous discoveries, catering to a wide array of potential online users. 

As an art historian, I typically visit an online collection with a specific work in mind, therefore using the collection to find that item. Rarely do I visit an online collection to browse casually. I open up the webpage, find the search feature, and type in the information I already know about the work I am searching for. Any results beyond this work are purely superfluous in my search, and many times non-related objects actively hinder my search if my search parameters are not detailed enough. For example, when I was working on a project on the statuette of Juno housed at the Ackland Art Museum, I often consulted the museum’s “eMuseum” to double-check information. The collection UI opens up to its main page, which is headed by a search box and a “View All Works” button. As someone with a specific object in mind, I usually just typed “statuette of Juno” into the search box and it eMuseum returned the object I was looking for.

But this isn’t the case in all instances. As someone who works with ancient Mediterranean antiquities, many objects lack official titles and are instead given descriptive names such as “Marble Portrait of a Young Woman” or “Monumental Hydria”. These names make it difficult to search for specific objects, since the names are more subjective than Leonard di Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or more recent works of art. If I search “Statue of Woman” on the Met’s online collection, I get nearly 2,500 results without adding any additional filters or terms.

So what actually makes a digital collection a “generous space”? Despite my apparent bashing of the Met’s online collection above, it actually does a reasonable job at catering to both search-focused users and browsing-focused users. On the collection’s homepage, users are given the option to search the collection via a standardized search bar (1) or browse the collection in a variety of ways. The Met consolidated its highlights under the “Highlights” tag (2) and also gives the options to search for only images in the public domain (3) for artists and other users interested in using their images for reproduction or re-imagination. Moreover, users can browse by individual subject collection (4)—which for the Met groups objects by the room or wing of the building they are located in.

The Ackland’s eMuseum is less of a generous space than the Met’s, as it lacks a clear browsing feature beyond dumping the user into a “View All Works” spaces. For the Ackland, this directs users to more than 22,000 works of art that require additional filtering—an overwhelming experience for many casual browsers. Of course, the Ackland has a much smaller online collection than the Met (~22,000 works vs ~535,000 works) and fewer resources to work with to develop their digital platform. 

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With the previous online collections explored and critiqued, it is time for me to turn your attention to one of my favorite digital collections: the Beazley Archive. Run by the Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) at the University of Oxford, the Beazley Archive is an online database version of Sir John Beazley’s classifications of Greek vase painting, which were published as volumes in 1942³ and 1956⁴. The database started as a visual companion to Beazley’s volumes, since they originally contained no images. 

Today, the database holds more than 137,000 individual records of Greek vases which are accessible through a variety of search formats. The original search feature—dubbed “Traditional Search”—is an HTML-based search engine predominantly used by older academics. There is no room for casual browsing in this search feature, as the tool requires specific information to locate vases.

Beyond this feature, “Advanced Search” is more geared towards search-ability and “Basic Search” is geared towards browse-ability. “Advanced Search” provides more options for filters than “Basic Search” does, allowing those with more knowledge of the online collection’s holdings to navigate for specific objects. “Basic Search” presents the user with eight options for an initial filter, allowing them to narrow down the 137,000 options by a single metric rather than a series of them.

Once an initial filter is applied, the Beazley Archive returns a page of images, allowing the user to filter through them by visual marker rather than metadata information. Below is an example search for vases in the hydria shape using the Simple Search. In this case, “Shape” was selected as the category from the list of options (see above, left) and “hydria” was selected as the shape. There were 3,418 results for hydriai in the Beazley Archive.

If these search options seem like too much for a user, the Beazley Archive also has a “Show a sample vase” button that will randomly generate a record from their collection, giving users a taste of the collection’s holdings. This button can be pressed as many times as desired, generating a different vase each time.

1. Michael Whitelaw. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1 (2015). ︎
2. Whitelaw, paragraph 46. ︎
3. John Beazley. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Clarendon Press. 1942. ︎
4. John Beazley. Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters. Clarendon Press. 1956. ︎

30 August 2026

This week I have chosen to focus my blog post on Emma Stanford’s “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Evaluating and Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource” (2020) because of my own interest in and past use of digital surrogates in art history. The article briefly highlights the history of digital surrogates—especially through photography—and the inequalities in the materials available digitally to the public. 

Especially noteworthy is Stanford’s note on the materials chosen for digitization being influenced by the person or group funding the digitization project, such as the digital collections of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford being in-proportionately slanted towards Hebrew manuscripts due to significant funding by the Polonsky Foundation from 2012 to 2017¹ . While this is not inherently an issue since libraries and museums are often tight on funding for digital projects, external funding does prioritize certain objects over others for digitization, potentially feeding into the historic cycle of certain areas of art and history being prioritized over others. In particular, objects associated with non-Western histories and cultures have historically received the short end of the stick in digitization, as there are fewer external foundations to privately-fund projects. This being said, is some digitization—even if it is not proportional to an institution’s overall collection—still worth accepting external funding for as opposed to no digitization?

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I would like to turn the remainder of this blog post towards another topic discussed by author Emma Stanford: the the unique difficulties that arise when digitizing three-dimensional objects into a (mostly) two-dimensional digital format. Stanford alludes to this idea when she discusses the pitfalls of digital reproductions, writing “a two-dimensional digital surrogate of that object is frozen at a particular angle, under a particular light, and presented with a particular viewing experience in mind.”². Since three-dimensional objects are intended to be viewed from multiple angles, capturing a two-dimensional snapshot of the object only digitizes a single viewing angle. Details—both significant and minute—are lost in two-dimensional reproductions of three-dimensional objects. 

Take Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621-1622) for example. Now housed at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the sculpture stands 116 inches (295 cm) in height and is displayed towards the center of a room, allowing visitors to walk around it and view the sculpture from all sides. From first glance, Bernini’s sculpture is an emotional, intricate depiction of the mythological tale, showcasing a terrified Proserpina as she is abducted by the god Pluto and dragged to the Underworld. She famously cries out as she is caught, the essence of which was rendered in her facial features by Bernini. Any viewer of this sculpture in-person would likely take the time to circle the work, identifying the minute features carved by Bernini that give insights into the emotions of the individuals portrayed.

center of the image, not Proserpina—Bernini’s sculpture when viewed from the back shifts the attention to Proserpina. From the back, she is the central figure with the highest range of motion and emotion, not Pluto. Proserpina is physically higher than Pluto is due to her outstretched arm, drawing the viewer’s eye towards her. Moreover, the intricate movements in the fabric of her clothing highlight the surprise she felt as she was suddenly abducted by Pluto, as she is clothed from the back but nude from the front—suggesting she was caught in a state of surprise. 

In reproducing only one vantage point of Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, Nicholas Dorigny’s engraving cuts out parts of the story told by Bernini—whether intentionally or unintentionally. Viewers are forced to see the story from a single perspective, mimicking the physical viewing experience relegated to a single perspective as well. Modern photographs still do the same thing. Photographs of Bernini’s work continue to exclude certain aspects of the three-dimensional sculpture. Many images taken from the same vantage point as Dorigny’s engraving completely exclude the inclusion of Cerberus beneath Proserpina, an important contextualization for the work’s story. The pressure with which Pluto grips Proserpina is also often missing from two-dimensional reproductions of the sculpture, as indicated by the strong grip he holds on her upper left thigh. 

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For the second part of my blog post I was tasked with uploaded scans completed earlier this week in class. We completed a digitization workshop in which each student scanned an image and a body of text of their choice. Adjustments were then made to the digitized files as needed in Photoshop, including cropping and minor color adjustments (for the image) and a very-unsuccessful attempt at OCR for the (handwritten) text. Apparently my handwriting is not legible to Adobe Acrobat.

Below is a scan of my reading notes from my museum studies seminar this semester. They come from an article assigned for reading: Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual,” in Preziosi and Farago, eds., Grasping the World, Part V, chapter 1.

I wouldn’t recommend you download them, unless you have a particular interest in Marxism and museum studies.

1. Emma Stanford, “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates: Evaluating and Contextualizing a Rapidly Changing Resource,” Routledge Companion, pp. 205.  ︎
2. Stanford, pp.207. ︎
3. Rossi, Domenico de’, “Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne: data in luce sotto i gloriosi auspici della Santita di N.S. Papa Clemente XI.” Stamperia della Pace. Rome. 1704. Available online via Internet Archive. ︎

23 August 2026

For my first blog post of the semester I chose to examine Alison Landmead’s “Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities” (2018). I found that the article was a comprehensive, yet rightfully critical overview of the benefits and pitfalls that art and architectural historians often encounter in using visual reproductions of objects in their work. With Langmead serving as the director of the Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh and holding faculty positions in the Department of Art and Architecture and in the School of Computing and Information, I would expect that her work in the digital humanities significantly impacts how she approaches the field. See her bio here.

Landmead’s article begins with an overview of the different visual reproduction methods art and architecture historians have used in the past. Beginning with later slides and later adopting the 35mm film slide, art historians have long sought out reproductions of the works they study for research and classroom teaching. Unlike in English Literature for example, the corpus of work used by an art historian cannot be easily duplicated and mass produced, leading to issues of accessibility. Oftentimes art historians are working with unique pieces that are housed in museums—or worse, private collections—that cannot travel. Image reproductions in the form of slides have been essential in the field for decades to bring the corpus of work into the art historian’s office. 

But, as Landmead herself points out, image reproductions are riddled with unexpected distortions and errors that often go unnoticed by the untrained eye. Color in particular is difficult to capture, as environmental factors such as lighting can alter the way an image in captured on film. Moreover, slides naturally degrade over time, causing colors to fade and bleed. Scale and proportions are also difficult to capture, as 35mm slides were standardized in their proportions. Two-dimensional works of art translated relatively well to slides, but any object that has texture or is three-dimensional will lose certain aspects of its depth when translated to a two-dimensional medium. 

The transition from 35mm film slides to digital images around the turn of the twenty-first century has brought its own challenges to image “accuracy” for art historians. Digital images require computer screens to view, which can slightly alter the colors of an image from its original. Moreover, computer screens are available at a wide array of different resolutions depending on brand, age, and price, resulting in different viewing experiences from screen to screen. A Dell monitor may show a digital image of a painting to be more cool in tone than an iMac, greatly affecting the coloring of the image and disadvantaging scholars with lower-quality or older technology. Classroom projectors face the same issue in displaying digital images for teaching. Institutions with higher budgets may elect to purchase higher-quality projectors for their classrooms, disadvantaging students and academic departments with lower budgets in their studies. 

Beyond image accuracy, digital images bring their own preservation problems to the hands of digital humanities. While slides physically degrade over time, digital images can become corrupt or obsolete as technology advances, rendering them completely unusable. A slightly discolored 35mm slide can still be used with the caveat that it is discolored, but a corrupted digital file is oftentimes unsalvageable once damage has been done. Moreover, digital files have to be transferred from storage solution to storage solution as technology advances so they can still be accessed. This is a necessary step for researchers because as technology progresses, the systems used to access old storage solutions become more and more difficult to access. But files can become corrupt if not transferred properly, increasing the risk of losing years of visual resources. 

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Alison Langmead’s article provides an excellent case study for researchers in the humanities as a whole to incorporate the use of digital technologies in the way they conduct research. Langmead is correct in her argument that art and architectural historians have been using digital technologies for decades in their work, as there are few other disciplines in which scholars are so physically far removed from the material they study. Before the rise of lantern slides for academic use, art historians were forced to rely on “mass” produced copies (that is, more mass produced than the original works) such as prints or plaster casts for study, which were riddled with inaccuracies themselves. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s now fundamental “Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766) is an excellent example of this. Written about the Laocöon statue group now housed in the Vatican Museums, Lessing’s essay was about a sculpture he only viewed from engravings, as he never actually travelled to Italy to see it in person. His essay was partly a response to Johann Joachim Wincklemann’s essays concerning the sculpture group (“History of Ancient Art”, 1756), but his thorough analysis of the aesthetics of the Laocöon group figures came from secondhand source materials. 

With all this in mind, what insights can art and architectural historians provide to the humanities as a whole in regards to digital methodologies? Digital tools oftentimes increase the accessibility of bodies of evidence, allowing researchers to access them from anywhere with an Internet connection. The rise of digitized materials such as books and archives in the last twenty years have shown that if materials are more accessible people will use them. But humanities scholars can incorporate digital tools into their methodologies as well as their source materials. Scholars of literature have increasingly turned towards tools such as text mining to look for new patterns in bodies of work that would otherwise be impossible to sort through. More humanities scholars have turned towards spatial mapping in the form of geographic information systems (GIS) to analysis patterns of movement and settlement, allowing for new breakthroughs in scholarship. 

At the end of the day, the humanities keep evolving as technology does, allowing scholars to develop new ways of thinking about their fields and sharing it.