Visual Resources

an international journal on images and their uses

ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Digital Art History

Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich & Melissa Gill

To cite this article: Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich & Melissa Gill (2019) Digital Art History, Visual
Resources, 35:1-2, 1-5, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887

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Published online: 22 Feb 2019.

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INTRODUCTION

Digital Art History

Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich and Melissa Gill

This introduction frames and situates this special issue of Visual Resources on the topic of
digital art history, intentionally assembled five years after the journal’s previous digital art
history issue with the goal of assessing the progress made in the field and encouraging more
widespread adoption of digital methodologies. It sets forth the key themes of this issue:
“thought pieces” on the state of digital art history and its value for scholarship and
pedagogy; the significance of databases for art history and the intellectual complexities they
entail; innovative computational analysis applied to material and social-historical questions
in art history; and the possibilities engendered by online publishing. These foci are
developed through and grounded in critically informed scholarly projects in digital art
history. These projects also bring to light professional, cultural, social, linguistic, and even
political issues encountered in practicing digital art history.
Keywords: Computational Analysis; Database Design; Digital Art History; Digital
Humanities; Digital Publishing; Pedagogy; Technical Art History

This could be the last special issue of Visual Resources devoted to digital art history. As
the articles presented here demonstrate, working with digital tools and methods is
rapidly becoming a routine part of how art-historical research is published and dissem-
inated and how art history is taught; for many, including ourselves and our authors,
working digitally is already an integral part of our practice. Indeed, the use of comput-
er-aided technology for art-historical research is not really a new phenomenon; it goes
back decades, to the early 1980s at least. Suffice it to think of projects like TAU (The-
saurus Artis Universalis), carried out under the aegis of the Comité International d’His-
toire de l’Art (CIHA),1 or the initiatives of the Getty Art History Information Program
(AHIP, later renamed the Getty Information Institute),2 to give just two examples.
What is new (and sometimes painful) for our discipline are the ways not only of pub-
lishing art-historical scholarship and their sources of evidence, and arguing with and
through the modes of analysis now enabled by digitally driven computation, but also
of understanding, curating, and sharing data, recognizing and validating new forms
of scholarly production, and working more collaboratively with other art historians
as well as across disciplines.
This special issue emerged from a call for papers in which we sought out authors
willing to help us explore the distance traveled from the previous issue dedicated to
Visual Resources, Volume 35, Numbers 1–2, March–June 2019
ISSN 0197-3762 © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887
2 Baca et al.

digital art history published by Visual Resources in 2013.3 In particular, we invited

authors to situate their work in the context of Johanna Drucker’s contribution to
that 2013 publication, “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?” Among the many important
points that Drucker raised was the observation that art history had been slow to adopt
the computational methods and tools of the digital humanities. We therefore sought
out papers that described projects that demonstrated such applications, while also striv-
ing to ensure that our contributors were advancing an argument and interpretation,
cognizant of Claire Bishop’s critique that computational analysis, in the context of
art history, carries the possibility of perpetuating “uncritical assumptions about the in-
trinsic value of statistics” and that scholarly contributions to digital art history have ex-
emplified “an avoidance of argumentation and interpretation” because “technology is
presumed to provide objective access to reality in a way that subjective interpretation
cannot.”4
We are also aware that forms of computational analysis such as text, image, geo-
spatial, or network analysis are entirely dependent upon their sources of evidence –
data – and how that evidence is interpreted, that is, how a database is constructed
through the selection and standardization of data and the organization of relationships,
and the querying and interpretation of data in the context of historically informed and
grounded hypotheses. We therefore also sought out papers that thoughtfully engaged
with this process and brought to the foreground the conscious, and sometimes difficult,
scholarly choices made in the process of carrying out these activities.
Of course, all of this research would not matter if it could not be shared with the
community, so we also invited authors engaged in online publishing projects. In par-
ticular, we were seeking endeavors that went “beyond the PDF,” that is, beyond simply
converting the printed page to the online environment. Instead, we pursued papers
about publishing endeavors that engaged with what might be made possible by the
digital environment, asking how to exceed the capacities of the printed page, which
already possesses well-tested approaches dating back centuries.
This issue has been organized around these three particular nodes of activity – the
database, analysis, and publishing – but we have also situated these activities within a
broader framework. The issue opens with what we have conceived of as “thought
pieces,” intended as catalysts or prompts to the field by advancing arguments rooted
in the authors’ own deep engagement with digital art history. In other words, while
these articles by Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, Paul Jaskot, Marco Cardinali, and Virginia
Spivey and Renee McGarry might be read as conceptual in nature, they emerge out
of and in response to “hands-on” experience. These authors share a concern with
how the discipline of art history is being re-thought, while also casting a glance back
to see how we got where we are today. This is followed by the section devoted to ex-
amples of database-focused projects, which prove that creating a database is anything
but straightforward and that its complications cannot be separated from disciplinary,
socio-historical, and ideological contexts, with articles by Emilia Kłoda and Ksenia Sta-
nicka-Brzezicka, and Caroline Bruzelius and Paola Vitolo. Computational analysis is
represented by the article dedicated to Project Cornelia’s investigation of seven-
teenth-century Flemish art communities, which advances an argument for “slow
digital art history,” and by Margaret Holben Ellis and C. Richard Johnson’s case for
 Introduction 3

computational connoisseurship. The challenges and opportunities of new modes of

publishing made possible by information technology are explored from the perspective
of an art museum in the article by Kelly Keegan and Genevieve Westerby, and from the
perspective of an academic research institute in the contribution by Baillie Card,
Martina Droth, Tom Scutt, and Sarah Victoria Turner on British Art Studies. We
close with news from the field in an article from the point of view of early career re-
searchers by Sophia Hatchwell, Fern Insh, and Hana Leaper and a short notice by
Alan Crookham and Stuart Dunn about their work-in-progress to develop a database
from a dealer’s historic archive in preparation for computational analysis.
Overall, these articles provide very practical examples and lessons on conducting
research, teaching, publishing, and sharing data and other resources in the digital
age. They also present thoughtful considerations on the professional, cultural, social,
linguistic, and even political issues surrounding art history in general and digital art
history in particular.
Moreover, these articles present a number of recurring themes that we have found
to be particularly relevant and timely. As several of the papers make very clear, technol-
ogy is not a “magic bullet,” and working with digital tools and methods is not “easier” or
faster than traditional art history (though of course many computations can be done at
speeds that would be unthinkable using manual methods). Data sets (including images)
in all of their messy, incomplete, and sometimes seemingly contradictory nature must
be well understood, and carefully “curated” and prepared for analysis in order to be able
to draw any kind of valid conclusions. Digital analysis of works of art and their agents
should never be severed from the historical, social, and economic contexts in which the
art was created, displayed, bought, and sold, and in which the various agents involved in
all these processes operated. These last two points show how data sets are not “interpre-
tations” or “conclusions” in and of themselves; all hypotheses and interpretations must
be made by examining data in conjunction with historical knowledge and taking into
consideration the contexts in which the works and artists exist.
The single voice or “lone wolf” approach to art history is rapidly becoming obsolete,
and we believe that this is a good thing. Complex research and publication projects like
the ones described in this issue require cross-disciplinary teams and good project man-
agement, two crucial things that have not been typical of most traditional art history
projects. Because of the culture of academic recognition (to echo a phrase used by
Brosens et al.), for a certain period to come, emerging art historians may have to
publish their work in both traditional and digital formats, to conform with the
“publish [in print] or perish” requirement that is still strong in many academic institu-
tions. Another paradigm shift is the issue of “ownership” of research data: traditionally,
art historians have jealously guarded the data that is the basis of their research. In the age
of open content and linked open data, this will – and must – change. Research data and,
if possible, the tools used for processing and analysis, should be made available for other
researchers to analyze and draw their own conclusions.
All the papers in this issue reflect how our profession is changing: how we work;
the skill sets and tools needed; methods of working in teams, publishing, and
sharing data; job responsibilities; and measures of success and “validation” are all un-
dergoing profound changes. We hope that the projects, challenges, and lessons learned
4 Baca et al.

that are presented in the papers in this issue will inform and inspire our readers to in-
telligently embrace digital tools and methods, and to make the discipline of art history
more timely, relevant, and democratic than it has ever been.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

MURTHA BACA, former head of Digital Art History at the Getty Research Institute in Los
Angeles, has more than three decades of experience as an implementer and teacher of de-
scriptive metadata and controlled vocabularies for art and architecture. She led the Getty
Vocabulary Program, which builds and maintains multilingual controlled vocabularies
for art, architecture, and material culture that are used all over the world. She developed
and taught, for 18 years, a graduate seminar on metadata for the UCLA Department of In-
formation Studies. She was a co-editor of Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing
Cultural Works and Their Images (American Library Association, 2006), and editor of Intro-
duction to Metadata (Getty Research Institute, 3rd edition, 2016). Murtha led a team of
scholars and technical experts that developed the Getty Research Institute’s first “born-
digital” scholarly publication, Pietro Mellini’s Inventory in Verse, 1681: A Digital Facsimile
with Translation and Commentary (2015). She twice received the De Laurier Award for dis-
tinguished achievement from the Visual Resources Association (VRA); in 2017 she received
the Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCLA Department of Information Studies.

ANNE HELMREICH is Associate Director for Digital Initiatives at the Getty Research In-
stitute in Los Angeles; prior to assuming this position, she was Dean, College of Fine Arts,
Texas Christian University. She has also served as Senior Program Officer at the Getty
Foundation, and Associate Professor of Art History and Director, Baker-Nord Center for
the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University. Her most recent monograph, investigat-
ing the relationship between art and science, is Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and
Science in Victorian Britain (Penn State University Press, 2016). Her current research
focuses on the history of the art market and the productive intersection of the digital hu-
manities and art history. She co-authored, with Pamela Fletcher, “Local/Global: Mapping
Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” the first article in Nineteenth-Century Art
Worldwide’s Digital Humanities and Art History series, funded by the Andrew Mellon
Foundation, and which won the ARIAH 2015 prize for best online essay.

MELISSA GILL is a metadata specialist for Digital Initiatives at the Getty Research Institute
in Los Angeles, where she works on data projects to support art-historical research and
scholarship. She holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University
of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Western Washington Univer-
sity. Her research interests include linked open data and new methods of metadata gener-
ation and enrichment for libraries, archives, and museums. She is also a lecturer in the
Graduate School of Education and Information Science at UCLA, teaching graduate sem-
inars on metadata.

Notes
1 See Thierry Dufrene, “A Short History of CIHA,” http://www.ciha.org/sites/default/
files/files/Short_History_of_CIHA.pdf (accessed December 2018).
 Introduction 5

2 Eleanor E. Fink, “The Getty Information Institute: A Retrospective,” D-Lib Magazine 5,

no. 3 (March 1999), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march99/fink/03fink.html (accessed
December 2018).
3 “Digital Art History,” ed. Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich, and Nuria Rodríguez Ortega,
Board-Approved Special Issue, Visual Resources, An International Journal of Documen-
tation 29, Nos. 1–2 (2013).
4 Claire Bishop, “Against Digital Art History,” Humanities Futures, Franklin Humanities
Institute (2017), https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-art-history/ (accessed
December 2018).