(Posted on behalf of Bradley Cavallo)<\/p>\n
Returning from a research trip abroad in the Summer of 2014, I faced the entwined problems of how to organize so as to understand my information. In this case, what I had collected consisted of hundreds of photographs documenting artworks in Rome. These portraits exist throughout the city, and with each one went transcribed Latin inscriptions that detailed to a greater or lesser extent the identity of the individual portrayed and when they had lived. All together, then, I possessed an unwieldy number of images and texts. In an initial attempt to schematize this body of information, I listed all of the artworks based upon where I had found them, the approximate dates of their creation, etc. as part of a simple Microsoft Word document. An ad hoc<\/em> color-coding system enabled me to see in a vague way the chronological range of the data (i.e. that these artworks had been created between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that a great proportion of them had been painted with oil paints on stone slabs and metal plates).<\/p>\n Tickling the back of my mind, a memory existed in which a colleague of mine named Danielle Abdon Guimaraes suggested that I investigate something called Omeka. To my current chagrin and for reasons unknown even to myself, I procrastinated in pursuing her advice. And yet, when the opportunity arose in late August to apply for a Digital Humanities Scholarship, I immediately recalled Danielle\u2019s advice and her presentation of the prior Spring concerning a digital reconstruction of many hundreds of years of urban development in Venice, Italy. With her project in mind, it seemed to me that the Digital Humanities could potentially offer a meaningful manner in which to learn how to do something with all of the information that I had accrued. I applied, and was thankfully accepted.<\/p>\n Admittedly, I was a newcomer, a neophyte to the idea and practice of the Digital Humanities. I had long used Microsoft Powerpoint and the whole suite of software products available to a PC user for the purposes of writing papers and making presentations for my art history classes. But what Danielle had done, and what I hoped I myself might do, represented something more complex, and (in retrospect) accordingly rewarding. To be clear: I knew nothing. I had no real clue what lay ahead of me, other than a tingling sensation, a hunch, an intuition, that an art historian could do a lot by digitizing art historical information. Surely, that\u2019s what the discipline had been doing all along? If not digitizing, then surely we\u2019d long been visualizing artworks the world over. Pace<\/em> Walter Benjamin, exciting students and conveying complex visual iconographies embedded in culturally-specific contexts to them depends on our reproduction of the work of art.<\/p>\n Over the course of my time participating with the Digital Humanities Scholarship program, I gradually came to understand the possibilities of various software and internet-based platforms like (you guessed it) Omeka. Because of the tutelage that I received from September, 2014 to April, 2015, I employed Omeka to create a website<\/a> that has helped me to organize and display in a superior way what I had documented and obtained in Rome. In this presently basic way, the Digital Humanities served me well, and suggests a mode of presenting and describing artworks verbally and visually to as many audiences as can be attracted.<\/p>\n Subsequent conversations with Danielle about Digital Humanities have revealed some interesting ideas and uncertainties. What, for example, research questions can a fully digitized or visualized art history project help to ask, let alone to answer? Will it be possible to utilize Digital Humanities to create a fully visual experience of art historical data without the necessity of verbal descriptions or explications? Exploring these, and other, questions will aid art history develop itself as a practice of historical inquiry, making it potentially less parochial and more collaborative.<\/p>\n Is Digital Humanities the future of art history?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Danielle A Guimaraes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3261,"featured_media":466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[289],"tags":[97,321,170],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-history","tag-data-visualization","tag-digital-scholarship","tag-omeka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/files\/2015\/04\/brad-300x172.png\")
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