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Thirtieth International Congress of the History of Art Art History for the Millenium: Time. Section 23 Digital Art History Time London, 3-8 September 2000 |
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Christopher Bailey <c.bailey@unn.ac.uk>, Professor, Department of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, United Kingdom. Telephone +44 191 227 3119. Fax: +44 191 227 4630
© each author has full responsibility in owning copyright on the texts and on the images they publish on this website
This paper is offered as a contribution to the debate about the changes taking place in the practice of the discipline of art history as a result of the availability of digitised reproduction of cultural artefacts.
A feature of the shift towards a digital culture has been the increased emphasis on the visual image. Despite this 'visual turn' in culture, and in the study of it, the practices of the art historian have been slower to reflect the availability of new technologies than have other disciplines. In the study of languages, for instance, some quite profound shifts can be observed in the balance of specialisms within the discipline as research techniques based on the quantitative analysis of text features make progress with the assistance of technology.
While it is accepted that the methods of the art historian are resistant to generalisation, the paper will attempt to draw tentative conclusions based on the quantitative results of a recent survey, as well as on the views of art history researchers themselves. In particular, the revival of corpus linguistics will be compared with a possible increase in interest in the creation of new, or digitised, corpora in art history.
The conclusions of the paper will inform the subject community in three ways. It will support the ongoing research project, Compare and Contrast, which is funded by AHRB at the University of Northumbria. It will also shed light on the factors affecting the rate of permeation of digital technology in art history, and will provide a first pass result of an analysis of shifting research priorities in the subject.
Note: a shorter, more speculative, version of this paper was given at CIHA2000 in London in September 2000 and was fully discussed in Session 23, Digital Art History Time. The authors are grateful to participants for their comments. This longer, revised account was given at DRH2000, held in Sheffield, September 2000, and will be published in the DRH proceedings in due course. The authors are grateful to the editors for permission to pre-print it here.
The core research questions we set out to answer in the Compare and Contrast project were based on the following tentative hypotheses, prompted by the initial results of a survey carried out in 1999/2000.
The project deliberately brings two quite different research methods to bear on these issues, one more or less quantitative, and the other rather more qualitative. Looking for quantifiable results, say in differences of age or gender in a given population, is reassuring for researchers, and no doubt for funders. It gives us something to fall back on, and makes us feel less terrified about the messiness of reality. The questionnaire survey part of the project is now past, and much of what can be quantified, has been. The next stage is the much more open analysis process in which the vocabulary our subjects use will itself become the structuring medium for the research. Even at this stage, however, it is plain that the answers given to our questions prompt some thoughts about the 'messy' reality of the way art historians work.
The questionnaire survey was undertaken as a way of providing a basis for the AHRB project, and was carried out with limited funding. With the help of the Association of Art Historians, we were able to identify UK based scholars based in institutions of higher and further education. The mailing list of 255 led to a return of 56 completed forms, a response rate of approximately 22%. We deliberately aimed to reach the art historian for whom digital image technology had had no impact as well as those for whom it had. We also tried to ensure that the focus was, as much as possible, on the respondents‚ research activities in art history, rather than on their teaching, where past studies are more numerous and the impact is more readily identified. The mailing list also deliberately excluded those whose main role is information or collections management, again because the impact on intermediaries rather than end users has been much more widely researched. (2)
In this paper we are drawing on the answers to three questions in the questionnaire;
As an informal control (and as a not-so-subtle form of self-advertisement) we also placed the questionnaire on the Internet at the IIDR site. We expected this method of distribution to attract more converts to digital image technology, and to involve more respondents from outside the UK, so we were interested to see if the responses on the kinds of art history the respondents are doing would be different. This survey attracted 65 responses, and included a small number of information and collections managers. In the recent paper referred to above, where we have discussed the profile of the sample in more detail, we noted that the responses for both groups is broadly similar with a marked inclination amongst both groups to agree that there has been some impact on working methods, but very little on research interests. (Figures 1 and 2)
It is this finding that I want to explore in some detail, despite the necessary caution with which the results of such a small sample should be treated. Surveys of the type we have completed necessarily deal in things that can be counted, and we are aware of posing more questions than we can answer at this stage. For instance, the possibility that a 'no' to the second impact question masks, not a lack of access to technology, or a lack of relevant digital image resources on the web, but a fundamental mismatch between an explicit description research method, and its actual conduct, will only become clear as the research activity itself is examined. As we get further into the qualitative stage of the project we hope that it will become possible to disentangle the cultural questions from the material ones.
In the series of 'Critical Perspectives' for which she has been responsible as editor of Art Bulletin, Nancy Troy has brought the changing nature of the discipline to the attention of academics art historians, especially in the United States. As Lisa Tickner states forthrightly in her contribution 'The Impossible Object', in a piece called the Object of Art History,
There is no (single, or upper case) 'Object' of art history in any of the immediate senses of: a) a given and undisputed disciplinary field: b) a category of artefacts self-evidently constituting the material basis for such a field: or c) a given disciplinary purpose or intent. (3)
Doubtless many art historians believe this to be the case, but do they then behave accordingly? As the second table drawn from our survey shows, those who feel that there has been an impact on their working methods outnumber those who feel there has been an effect on their research interests. Somewhat more online respondents recognised the impact on the latter, but the number is still strikingly small, given what most commentators agree is the potential of the internet to offer resources which were not hitherto available without expenditure of time or money. There were some positive responses. One respondent claimed that digital image technology 'Inspired me to become an art historian'. (4) Most responses were negative or grudging about the impact, and many would agree with the respondent who said,
... my research interests are not dictated by digital images. My research in archives comes first, then I might look for digital images. If they exist, great, if not - (5)
What is available on the web, then, falls well short of being as reliable as a conventional archive in its capacity to support or extend art historical enquiry. This respondent may not trust what is out there, or may not find it functionally relevant. The judgement of trustworthiness is made in the light of what seems like a 'real' object of study.
In most accounts of art historical method, there is an assumption that an individual researcher will find himself or herself somewhere on a spectrum of engagement, at one end engaged with the object (as in formalism, connoisseurship and some forms of iconographic work) and at the other dealing with textual evidence and abstract ideas (as in cultural history, socio-economic analysis, psychoanalysis and biography). Such discussions, concerned as they are with what, if anything, exists between 'art' and 'history' often end with an appeal to 'call into question the oppressive effects of an epistemology based on the principle of a clear and non-ambiguous distinction between subject and object of knowledge'. This is Tickner, quoting Jane Gallop on the equally contested field of Women‚s Studies, but the appeal to a liberal conscience, 'aiming for an interpretive adequacy with a principled and reflexive skepticism', (6) may offend conservatives, but probably suits almost everyone else on the political spectrum.
In his contribution to the volume on The New Art History, Stephen Bann argued against a false dichotomy of 'new' and 'old' by pointing out the diversity of approach present in art history before its renewal in the 1970s; his famous sequence spans the range 'from Gombrich to Gowing'. (7) It is enjoyable to indulge in historiographical fantasies of the kind promoted by David Watkin in his description of the extraordinary cargo‚ of German scholars and books despatched from Hamburg to Woburn Square, bringing kulturgeschichte to a profession which, until then, had spent its time comparing painted earlobes and toenails. (8) In permitting themselves this shorthand, historians of art history allow tendencies such as the 'new art history' to be exemplified by individuals, while their practice is, at the same time, represented, or mis-represented, only by the exemplary principles of the discipline. Ironically, few art historians would now apply such a reductive approach to their subject. It is tempting to sum this up as a maxim; tendencies are to historiography what modern art movements are to the historian. (9)
In posing the third question in our questionnaire, about the analytical techniques adopted by respondents, we assumed the existence of just such a spectrum as described above. We did not assume that one method had driven out another, although we were surprised by the extent to which the supposedly 'old' methods continue to be used. The working terminology was taken from the Getty study and consisted of the following terms;
A graphical presentation of the response to this question tells the story (Figures 3 and 4). Of the mainstream approaches, connoisseurship, psychoanalysis and structuralism are the least popular, while most respondents say they use social and cultural history. Slightly more respondents to the online survey cited formalist or iconographic techniques than was the case with the AAH survey. This probably reflects the greater emphasis on earlier periods in the staff interests, and in the curriculum, in North America. It is worth noting at this point that this cultural difference is also reflected in the breakdown of specialisation of our respondents. On reflection we began to wonder what the ranking of choices might imply about the working methods of our sample. How many choices did respondents think it reasonable to tick?
The number of methods used by each respondent is shown as a graph (Figures 5 and 6). In the AAH survey, of 56 respondents, a total of 303 choices were made, an average of 5.5 out of the 11 available options per respondent. The pattern is very similar for the web survey. Here, the 65 respondents made a total of 336 choices, an average of 5.7 per respondent. One further respondent, who used the 'other' box to state that he/she uses 'whatever (technique) informs the problem being investigated', is making explicit what is implicit in this pattern of response. We have tentatively concluded that working art historians do not conform to the mono-technical stereotypes of the historiographer's narrative, not do they fit comfortably into the ideological positions fashioned by the polemicists of new versus traditional methods. When T J Clark wrote that he didn't want to be just 'a bit of a social historian of art', he was arguing that adherence to that approach meant forsaking all others. To judge from the evidence, it appears that fidelity is not the profession's most obvious feature.
Our survey deliberately followed the pattern of the 1988 Getty study of art historians‚ methods, in which Clark was one of the respondents. (10) Probably few of our respondents have as great a personal investment in a given technique as Clark, and we might therefore conclude that most art historians are likely to be pragmatic about method. Guiding their choice is a belief in the underlying 'object' of study, which indicates how the research is to be done, and thus what resources will be relevant.
It is important to recognize that this realistic/pragmatic approach does not necessarily entail a reliance on quantitative techniques. While both social sciences and the literary humanities generally have made substantial large-scale use of automated analysis of data, art history, so far, has not. Here there appears to be a disciplinary fault-line. The location of art history in relation to other arts and humanities disciplines in the categorizations employed by the funding and management structures for UK Higher Education has often been subject to queasy shifts. Due largely to its relationship to creative practice, and perhaps sometimes in reaction to forced proximity to it, the subject partakes both of the intuitive character of a critical discipline and of the objectivity aspired to by a social science. A further indicator of the uneasy place of art history in the range of disciplines is its position within the now defunct Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) in the UK. Tacked on to archaeology and history during the life of the CTIs, presumably as a cognate discipline, it has subsequently been relocated to art and design under the new regime of the Learning and Teaching Subject Network (LTSN).
Publications of Craft, the CTICH magazine, reported relatively infrequently on art history databases or teaching tools, by comparison say, to publishers' CD-ROM image collections. By contrast, despite the teaching remit of the CTI Network, the Language and Linguistics section of Craft's sister publication, CTI Textual Studies, often emphasised the significance of tools based on quantitative research methods.
This section largely deals with corpus linguistics, and looks at the range of corpora, dictionaries and thesauri now available on CD-ROM and the Internet (…) Recent years have seen an incredible increase in the amount and diversity of language corpora available. This growth is partly a result of advances in the technology available for capturing and storing spoken and written language, and also due to the new uses to which such data are being put. (11)
University departments of language and linguistics have been remarkably prolific in their production of widely disseminated resources consisting of language corpora. Often these are a way of promoting a research reputation and, clearly, in the case of highly topical or sensational cases, they have value in the recruitment of students. Whatever the motive, it is not a radical statement in linguistics, as it would be in art history, to say that the discipline is being shaped by the insights resulting from the deployment of digital technology.
The problem with embracing the corpus, for many art historians, is the implication that it must be accompanied by an empirical method. Ernst Gombrich, a noted sceptic of both quantitative and digital techniques, blamed the 'cult of inductivism' for the belief that 'truth emerges in the form of generalizations based on the accumulation of data'. Criticising this is as the 'idola quantitatis' he asks whether the difference between research in the humanities and the social sciences lies exactly in that the latter relies on bodies of data for testing theories. Even granting the importance of reference books and dictionaries for the humanities, he asks if the ideal of completeness is either achievable or useful. Do we, he asks, 'need a corpus of all doorknockers?', (12) not because doorknockers are in themselves without interest, but because the questions such a corpus might be used to ask would inevitably be trivial. Even though we might find this a prejudiced view, one might observe (in a jaundiced way), that such a project would be likely to be team based, and might more readily gain institutional support than a project based on a lone researcher's impeccable, but humanistic, reading‚ of door furniture.
An obvious feature of a corpus of linguistic material is that its existence does not imply a criticism of any other. In the case of the corpus in art history, we find it hard to imagine a corpus, in the form of a canon, which does not exclude some artefacts. In so doing it may invite debate. Indeed, for many, the act of discriminatory exclusion is what the canon is about. Not surprisingly, Keith Moxey, in an Art Bulletin article, describes the project to replace the canon as a 'utopian dream'. (13) Instead, he calls for a 'motivated history' that will contest the canon. He notes the relative reluctance of art historians, compared with their colleagues in literary studies, to topple the canonical figures, and concedes that, in art history the outcome is likely to be multiple canons, each written from a different ideological perspective, gay and lesbian, feminist, post-colonial and so on.
As we have seen, respondents to our survey are most unwilling to desert the empirical basis of their research, but are also finding it difficult to locate their work in a larger, shared corpus. The language of Moxey's manifesto is appealing, as is the figure of the reflexive, sceptical‚ historian described by Tickner, and it is clear that many subscribe to it. Despite the prominent appearance on the cover of Eric Fernie's book Art History and its Methods: a Critical Anthology, of the terms 'canon' and 'connoisseurship', the former dominance of the concepts is now reduced to the point where the former is 'always understood as an artificial construct'‚ and the latter is no more than a kind of pre-history, akin to diagnosis in medicine. (14) In his glossary entry on 'the canon', Fernie, tellingly, cites as the authority, not an art historian, but a literary and critical theorist, Terry Eagleton. But even if the role of the canon in art history has diminished, this does not mean that the hierarchical structure of value, which generated it, has vanished. As Adrian Rifkin puts it, more often than not, radical art historians fall into line, although they might first insist that the canon gets filled out a bit. (15)
Of course art history is a very diverse subject and it is entirely possible to imagine a gradient of adoption of technology depending on the respondent's research area. Our project recognises that use of a given digital image technology would depend on its applicability to the user's specific problem or object of study. Having determined whether respondents identified with a particular aspect or sub-field of art history we are currently beginning to explore differences in the way images are used. As art history approaches the condition of archaeology, does it become more amenable to a discourse of objective analysis, of measuring, counting and comparing?
A striking feature of the current situation is not the quantity of research time spent on analysing the scope and organisation of image data, and indeed of its retrieval, but the lack of attention to the means of visualising them. (16) The invention of the epidiascope in the 1880s and Heinrich Wolfflin's almost contemporaneous development of the 'binary' method of image display gave art history both an organisational principle and an enduring presentational habit. (17) Of course, colour slides, like photography before it, had a major impact on the way art history is taught. Almost certainly, art historical research will also have been shaped, even if we are not yet clear how. Anne McCauley, an art historian based in Boston, who is researching the relationship between photographic technologies and art history, has made some interesting proposals for correlations of a range of attitudes and pre-dispositions. She asked us if we are finding the following;
Is adoption linked to an interest in creative use of medium?
Are adopters left wing/progressivist in their political views?
Are adopters pro-technology in general e.g. their attitude to domestic equipment?
Is adoption linked to family circumstances, such as family reasons for use?
As yet, we have no answers to these questions, but we do expect to find there are both personal and institutional factors influencing adoption. In particular, take-up of digital image resources might be influenced powerfully by two institutional or technical factors. The first is the need to be explicit about the objectives of teaching and learning for reasons of accountability within the regimes of assessment and audit governed by the UK Quality Assurance Agency. By forcing to the foreground the competences that the curriculum develops in students, this seems likely to engineer a closer relationship between student discovery and revision of ideas about images through direct manipulation. A striking feature of the assessment reports published by the agency following the recently concluded round of inspections is that, in the aims and objectives of many departments visited, the term 'visual literacy', or something similar, is frequently used to describe a competence that the courses hope to foster. Given the increasing familiarity with digital technology of each new generation of students, it may well be that it is their expectations and demands that will drive both provision of digital images resources and their use in the art history curriculum.
A further feature of art history demonstrated by the assessment reports is the extent to which, in the UK, the curriculum is driven by individual research specialisms. These very often inform an options programme alongside core courses or modules. It is therefore tempting to look for a relationship between image technologies transferred from individual research into teaching and vice-versa. Yet it seems to be a characteristic of many projects designed to bring image data into use, that they have remained confined to one site or institution, or have expired before they have had time to influence the community or be adopted. Thus, in the 1990s, no major product emerged in art history to match those from the UK Teaching and Learning Technology Programme in History. Instead there was considerable individual experimentation like the kind of 'barefoot computer programming'‚ reported annually at conferences of CHArt (Computers and History of Art) over the last two decades. Such work, in the form of small databases or tutorial demonstrations were passed from hand to hand, but have not been successfully commercialised.
More recent, larger scale, initiatives in many countries show real promise as research and teaching tools. Where a profession revolves around the adoption of common standards, as is the case for information managers, the development of agreed protocols has been achieved though a consultative process, with a subsequent widespread adoption. Many examples from Getty AHIP initiatives bear this out, from the Art and Architecture Thesaurus to the Object ID standard for missing or stolen works of art. In the academic professions, it seems reasonable to look for a parallel amongst the site licensing projects, most of which have aimed to put large image databases into the hands of school and university teachers. But, at least in the case of the latter, it seems that greater heterogeneity of approach and specialism has worked against adoption of commonly held image banks, even for core courses within the curriculum. (18) All too often a promising project, such as the Michigan Image Cataloging System, which is based on an image resource dating back to 1911, ends by running into the sands of apparent market failure. In this instance, custom-built software that proved its worth on the original site, and was advertised to potential users worldwide in 1995, was withdrawn by 1995. The developers told enquirers,
This program is no longer in distribution. The developing department is no longer able to provide even minimal support for users outside of Michigan, so we are not making the program available. (19)
In the case of resources to support advanced courses and staff research, the dynamic of discipline development itself may produce a divergence, rather than a convergence of working methods. There is a telling description in Marilyn Lavin's 1997 article on 'Making Computers Work for the History of Art'. Dispensing with the term 'database' as implying something too large, too public and too ambitious she says,
What is am looking for is an expression of a mass of material that is intellectually focused on a particular issue, that is constructed and used privately by a scholar in considering a specific problem, and that becomes a permanent retrievable record of a sequence of personal ideas and sources. (20)
There are similar views expressed in the Getty report that is the forerunner of our project. As the Getty study showed, truly useful published corpora are rare in art history. The art historian produces his or her own, often at great personal expense. Creating it is a form of research in itself. Scaling up is not necessarily possible, despite the research funders' desire for 'dissemination', because the structure of the corpus may be too personal to be transferable. Indeed, the personal character of a project may eventually come to be part of its appeal, even to the extent that revisions attempt to retain the style of the original text, as has happened in the case of recent revisions of Nikolaus Pevsner's monumental county-by-county Buildings of England. (21)
A major online corpus project, the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, began with just such a scholar's index card files. In this case George Zarnecki's original materials had already formed the basis of authoritative publications. The project team now faces the task of creating photographic evidence to match what are often annotated pencil sketches, and creating consistency amongst the vast amount of additional data supplied by field-workers. To effectively support the work of the broad audience of medievalists, CRSBI faces, not only the technical challenge of interoperability with other online databases, but also the explicit definition, through glossaries and authority files, of the research paradigm that underpins it. At the same time as the 5000 records of such a database inform and support work in the discipline, they also define it through explicit and implicit rules of inclusion. As Derek Law reminded delegates at the Digital Resources in the Humanities Conference in 1999, the Internet 'is not a value free domain'.
The canon and both public‚ and individually defined corpora, exist in a fluid relationship with one another, shifting under pressures which include the amount of backing for a project, the acceptance of the paradigm by the profession, and the relative authority of individual scholars. Just as in e-commerce, the web makes it extremely hard to judge the standing of a resource simply by using it online. While this is a source of concern for some people, especially nervous academics worried about what their students will find on the web, other scholars have grasped the opportunity to publish interpretations which challenge orthodoxy. They can easily achieve standards of presentation which are indistinguishable from, or better than, those of many a venerable museum web site.
Marylin Lavin's corpora, published on the web as Project ECIT, intentionally invite the user to manipulate data and construct further databases. But readymade drawing, or analytical, tools, other than the ability simply to juxtapose images, are still rare. It is not only in the fine art conservation studio where matching through overlay or point for point comparison would provide valuable research data. Charles Rhyne recently listed no fewer than sixteen ways in which the computer, through the provision of multiple views of objects, of details, of different resolutions, and of contextual material, might increasingly enable the virtual manipulation of images. (22) One such tool with great potential is the virtual ruler‚ which allows overlay to happen on screen as it would on a light box. This has been developed by Tim Benton to work on a corpus, assembled over twenty years, of around 5000 drawings relating to Le Corbusier buildings. By juxtaposing different states of a representation in this way, researchers achieve results that would take far longer, or would be impossible using the eye unaided. (23) As our study proceeds, the second phase of in-depth interviews is already suggesting ways in which art historians would like to manipulate images in order to test their theories.
The stability of the 'object', given its repeated re-description in histories, gallery layouts and bibliographical systems, is evidently open to question. The 'mapping of art history'‚ discussed recently by Robert Nelson, shows how unstable a supposedly objective entity such as a listing quickly becomes. Take the headings for American and Canadian dissertations, published in Art Bulletin,
As Nelson comments, the list is 'neither natural, consistent, nor logical according to our cultural categories, much less those of other societies, and presumably is a function of its compilers and the material to be compiled'. Our simple minded attempt to sort respondents can only be excused on the grounds that it is no worse, if no better, than that criticised by Nelson.
The map of art history is written by the modern, the national, and the Euro-American and by their culturally derived senses of order, classification and system. Will all mutate or dissolve when the World Wide Web replaces the World Wide Map? Or will the latter merely remake the former in its and our own image? (25)
It is an observation, not of the philosophical state of art history, but of the habits of work and thought of actual art historians, that word and image, pace Bryson, are not alike as forms of representation. Art history's corpora have an appearance of being natural, which the conventional codes of language cannot assume. That it is only an appearance does not matter. The difference may be sufficient to ensure that the contested object of art history continues to evade the interrogative power of digital technology, while linguists and others, whose object both seems more abstract and conventional, make increasing use of it.
Professor Chris Bailey is Head of the School of Humanities and a founding member of the Institute for Image Data Research. His research interests include the application of image analysis and retrieval techniques to the History of Art and Design and the Conservation of Fine Art. He assisted in the setting up of ADAM, the Art, Design, Architecture and Media Internet Gateway, and its sister project, VADS, the Visual Arts Data Service. He supervised the ADAM User Needs Survey in 1996 and is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Design History and the CHArt (Computers and History of Art) Journal.
Mrs Margaret Graham is currently on secondment from the School of Information Studies as Research & Development Manager of IIDR. Her research interests include the visual information needs of users, the evaluation of IR systems and the effects of ICT in libraries and information services. She is currently the project head of the joint IIDR/British Library (Library & Information Commission) funded VISOR Project, researching information seeking behaviour in image retrieval.
1. An awareness of, and interest in, the transformative effects of the technology have been present ever since art historians began to adopt it. Will Vaughan, for instance, is at pains to rebut the assumption that the automated analysis of formal characteristics necessarily entails a return to the values and attitudes of the 19th century connoisseur, to the extent that he describes the choice of the name Morelli for the system as 'unfortunate'. See, Vaughan, William, 'Automated picture referencing', Computers and the History of Art, Vol. 2, 2, 1992, p. 8.
2. Bailey, Chris and Graham, Margaret E, 'Compare and Contrast: measuring the impact of digital imaging on the discipline of art history', DRH99 Conference Proceedings, (London, 2000)
3. Tickner, Lisa, 'The Impossible Object?', Art Bulletin, (New York, September 1994), Vol. LXXVI, Number 3, p. 404
4. Compare and Contrast Survey, University of Northumbria, Respondent W19, Section 3 - researchint.doc
5. Compare and Contrast Survey, University of Northumbria, Respondent 20, Section 3 - researchint.doc
6. Tickner, Lisa, 'The Impossible Object?', Art Bulletin, (New York, September 1994), Vol. LXXVI, Number 3, p. 407
7. Bann, Stephen, 'How revolutionary is the new art history', in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, Frances, (eds.) The New Art History, (The Camden Press, London, 1986), p.23.
8. The establishment of the Warburg Institute in 1932 as described in Watkin, David, The Rise of Architectural History, The Architectural Press, London, 1980, p. 148.
9. There are many instances of this generational, or revolutionary narrative. A good encapsulation is given in Powell, Richard J, 'Art, History and Vision', in Art Bulletin, (New York, September 1995), Volume LXXVII, Number 3, p. 379.
10. The project findings were reported in Bakewell, E., Beeman, W. O., Reese, C. M., and Schmitt, M. Object, Image, Inquiry: the Art Historian at Work, Getty Art History Information Program (Santa Monica 1988)
11. Condron, Frances, Fraser, Michael, and Sutherland, Stuart, CTI Textual Studies: Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities, (Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford, 2000), p. 47.
12. Gombrich, Ernst H., 'Research in the Humanities: Ideals and Idols', in Ideals and Idols, Essays on values in history and in art, (Phaidon, Oxford, 1979), p. 116
13. Moxey, Keith, 'Motivating History'‚ in Art Bulletin, (New York, September 1995), Volume LxxV11, Number 3
14. Fernie, Eric, Art History and its Methods: a Critical Anthology, (Phaidon, London, 1995), pp. 329-331.
15. Rifkin, Adrian, Art Histories‚ in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, Frances, (eds.), The New Art History, (The Camden Press, London, 1986), p.159. This observation is similar to that made about Clark's social history, and is borne out by the failure in the 1980s of the challenge to the canon to engender a genuinely inclusive history of visual culture.
16. See, for instance, the recent consultant's report on a successor to the UK based Internet gateway for the art, design, architecture and the media (ADAM), Porter, Georgina, RDNC Creative Arts and Industries Consultancy, (CALIM, Manchester, 2000).
17. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, 'Researching Visual Images with Computer Graphics', Computers and the History of Art, (London, 1992) Vol. 2, 2, p. 1
18. See, for instance, reports on the Museum Education Site License Scheme (MESL), such as Besser, Howard and Yamashita, Robert (eds.), The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: the Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution and Usage of Image Data, A report to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, (Berkeley: UCB School of Information Management, 1998)
19. Fax from University of Michigan's Technology Management Office, January 16, 1995. The system is described in Blouin, Joy, 'Michigan Image Cataloging System Software', Computers and the History of Art, (London, 1994) Vol. 4, 2, pp. 17-24
20. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 'Making Computers Work for the History of Art', Art Bulletin, (New York, 1997) Volume LXXIX, Number 2, p. 198
21. Grundy, John, McCombie, Grace, Ryder, Peter, Welfare, Humphrey, and Pevsner, Nikolaus, Northumberland, The Buildings of England series, (Penguin, London, 1992). The Foreword to the Second Edition states (p. 20.), 'The Introduction to this edition incorporates many of Sir Nikolaus‚ stimulating insights, but also includes new interpretations made in the light of new research and new interests, for example in vernacular ad industrial buildings'.
22. Rhyne, Charles S, 'Images as Evidence in Art History and Related Disciplines', VRA Bulletin, (New York, 1998) Volume 25, Number 1, p. 58.
23. Benton, Tim, 'Le Corbusier and his Drawings: an Integrated Database and Drawing Package', Computers and History of Art Conference Abstracts, (London, 1999), www.chart.ac.uk/chart99/benton.html
24. The list appeared in Art Bulletin, LXXVII, No. 2, 1995, pp. 346-53, and is quoted in Nelson, Robert, 'The Map of Art History', Art Bulletin, (New York, 1997), Volume LXXIX, Number 1, p. 29
25. Nelson Robert, 'The Map of Art History', Art Bulletin, (New York, 1997) Volume LXXIX, Number 1, p. 40
Compare and Contrast: measuring the impact of digital imaging on the discipline of art history
The paper will present the results of a two year study of the extent to which the availability of digital imagery has changed the ways in which art historians go about the business of research and teaching in their subject, and will assess the implications for the future of the discipline.
The material to be presented will be drawn from a) an examination of the accounts by art historians of the methods relevant to their discipline, b) the results of a questionnaire survey to be conducted amongst scholars in the UK, the sample for which will include representation of sub-disciplines such as architectural and design history, of scholars working in a range of periods, and towards a variety of ends, and c) the outcome of a more limited study of the attitudes of a small group of art historians.
Art historical methods are now applied to the whole of visual culture. Art historians, at least potentially, have more to gain than most academics from changes brought about by the digital revolution, which supports the more accurate reproduction of visual material, vastly increased ease of access to stored images, and some entirely new ways of categorising and analysing visual data.
In 1988 the Getty AHIP published the results of a study of 20 art historians' working methods, based on interviews carried out in 1986. At that point image libraries were at an early stage of development and the internet was a specialist's means of retrieval of image files, likely to be carried out only with technical assistance. Speculation about the impact of IT was possible, however, and the foresight of the interviewees tells us a lot about the expectations of the discipline at that point. But the experience of using some potential research tools, such as networked image resources, was insufficient to gauge any impact on working methods. Take-up has been markedly limited for a range of reasons; technical, legal and cultural.
Ten years on this study examines the extent to these factors have influenced practice and shaped the collective agenda for the discipline. On the one hand access to tools to manipulate digital images might influence art historians to frame research questions which are comparative in nature. On the other, the increased ease of access to images of visual culture permits staff and students to participate more readily in framing novel art historical questions. One might also speculate that practitioners of the "new" art history will be less likely to take advantage of increased access of improved manipulative capability compared with art historians working on projects based on clearly defined corpora.
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