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Overcoming Art Historical Challenges with Digital Humanities

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Though there have been recent advances in art historical digital research and publishing, there are still disciplinary challenges to overcome. This paper examines the hesitations of art historians to adapt digital humanities’ practices into their research methods and suggests areas for potential development. Art History’s disinterest with digital research and publishing is the consequence of many factors; including reluctance to collaborate, confusion and misunderstanding of copyright and fair use, and conservative biases that exclude experimental research methods. A survey of the literature on art history, libraries and new media studies, including a 2010 Kress Foundation report on digital art history, shows that libraries, museums, academic presses and foundations are leading the effort with digital humanities’ tools, which have yet to be incorporated by art historians in their research. For progress in the future, art historians will need to participate in collaborative projects, work in digital platforms and make greater strides in digital publishing. This paper argues that for ‘digital’ art history to find a place within art history as a discipline there needs to be room for experimentation. As digital tools, such as image analysis, metadata enhancement and repository development become more sophisticated it will be harder for art historians to justify their refusal to adopt them into their work. By adapting and experimenting with the digital research innovations occurring in other humanities’ disciplines for their own purposes, art historians can overcome the challenges of e-publishing and assert their role as innovators of new platforms.

UX User Testing Evaluation 
User experience evaluation of New York Art Resources Consortium website using User Testing method. Written for LIS course of UX Theory & Practice.
UX User Testing

Multimedia

Job Talk presentation on Emerging and Current Models of Reference Service. Created for a LIS course on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication

A brief tutorial of SlideShare, a web-based platform for sharing presentation slides. Use SlideShare to find presentations, upload your own presentations and post or share presentations to another site. Created for LIS course on Digital Humanities.