Digital Art History: The Transformative Effect of Digital Technologies
The digitization of information, images, books, and articles has transformed not only how art is produced, but also how it is studied.
The tools and opportunities available to academic art historians and to museum professionals is drastically different than before, making the process of searching for information quicker and easier, but also changing what information is available. The impact of digitization can be categorized intro three primary areas: digital archival collections, newcomers to digital scholarship, and the digitization of art history.
1. Digital Archival Collections and Research Material
The most obvious impact and benefit that this age of information has had on art history is the digitization of archival collections and of books and journals. Art historians and museum professional are not longer dependent on local archives and libraries to obtain information about an artist or time period. Extensive travel is no longer necessary to see a detailed image of certain works of art or to read archival texts. Below is an image from the Book of Hours at Harvard Library’s Digital Collections.
Art history includes data analysis in order to understand art historical, social, economic, stylistic, and geographic trends. By having information digitized, these analyses can be executed on a much larger scale and can help in identifying trends and relationships that may not have been possible previously. A number of universities and academics are already taking on these challenges and opportunities.
2. Newcomers to Digital Scholarship
There are completely new sources in digital scholarship for art historians and museum professionals. New digital environments and specific tools, such as social media, data mining, and visualization techniques, provide new areas of study and completely new tools to process information. Social media permits contemporary artists and audiences to engage with and comment on art in ways that were previously not possible. These comments and ways of engaging can be used by scholars to better understand the interactions people have with art in real time. Other digital processing tools make the analysis of information much faster and more efficient, allowing more time for other research and responsibilities.
3. Digital/Computational Art History
Finally, innovative projects, beyond those associated with archival material, have provided creative, three-dimensional, and interactive sources. Google Arts and Culture is one of the most famous examples of this, particularly with its interactive museum street view walk-through. Users can take a walk through the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from anywhere in the world, seeing the space and many works of art. At the same time, you can take a walk around the Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan or the Pyramids in Giza, Egypt. In addition, you can zoom in to famous works of art, and see the details, for example, of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Other interactive and detailed sources include Mapping Gothic France and the Timeline of Modern Art. All of these new digital opportunities and tools in art history have opened the door for more in-depth research and conclusions, quicker access to materials, and even a new discipline of digital art history (offered at select universities).
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