Dealing with Art Historical Sources Across the Digital and Analog Divide

 15-03-2024 14:15 - 15:45 GMT+1 || Join us on Zoom|| Back to the programme

(9:15 New York Time exceptionnaly this week)

Speakers:

• Paul Jaskot, Duke University

• Stephen Whiteman, Courtauld Institute of Art

Abstract

If there is a ‘divide’ between art history and digital art history, or between ‘analogue’ and ‘computational’ methods in art history, then surely data lies at the heart of it. Digital art history is supposedly about data—its harvesting, management, analysis, and visualisation—whereas analogue art history seems to eschew it, preferring information gleaned from texts, archives, and, above all, images and objects. Analogue art history is sceptical of the rigidity of datasets, their boxes upon columns upon rows waiting to be filled suggesting a determinative method that runs contrary to the subtlety and nuance of humanistic description. Digital art history, similarly, seemingly sees analogue art history as vague and even imprecise, forever missing the larger questions of data’s forest for the anecdotal questions of the trees.

For all this, however, it is quite clear that the ‘data divide’ is more smoke than fire—aren’t ‘data’ and ‘information’ essentially synonymous, words representing disciplinary positions rather than fundamentally different things? Certainly, over a decade of digital art history work has made that argument, showing the blur of evidence-as-data more than once. In this regard, perhaps moving past the idea that analogue and digital art history are somehow divided, by data or anything else, can lead us towards more fundamental divides that the two subdisciplines share in common, and to which they might, complementarily, hold an answer.

Specifically, getting beyond the divide means shifting the debate from methodological differences to how analogue and digital art history both think about their sources. Art historians are famously omnivorous, drawing upon artistic and non-artistic sources alike. Yet our management of those sources is often as much art as method. The digital, on the other hand, is often beholden to its sources: creating questions in response to datasets, it struggles with the fractured partiality in sources with which analogue methods are most comfortable. Yet in both cases, it is often the tantalizing ambiguity of the source and its potential that drives the interest in the research.

How can the digital help us to clarify our sources in ways that shed new light on their nature (source criticism) and use (applied method)? Does the digital provide a means for putting incommensurate sources—not just the artistic and non-artistic, but the visual and material, the physical and conceptual, etc.—in dialogue with one another? Can the relative rigidity of the digital offer new perspectives on the more malleable analogue, whether around our questions, our methods, or even what constitutes an art historical object?

At the same time, we may also highlight how the apparent clarity offered by the digital is in some way deceptive. Neither digital data nor its tools are neutral; both reflect the positionality, perspectives, and biases of their creators. The promise of a great disciplinary decentering and intellectual accessibility offered by DH seems substantially unrealized by digital art history. What can the analogue help us see about the limitations and blind spots of the digital? And can the analogue help us realise a digital art history that is rooted in the locality and cultural specificity of our sources?

The two historians leading this conversation do not sit on opposite sides of the ‘digital divide’—both are historians of art and architecture whose work has been profoundly shaped by the use of computational methods and the questions that have arisen from it. They work in very different historical and cultural contexts, however, and therefore with very different sources, and as such, the answers and approaches that have emerged for each have been quite distinct. Drawing on Todd Presner’s notion of an ‘ethics of the algorithm’, this conversation explores how digital and analogue art histories have positioned themselves ethically relative to their artistic and non-artistic sources, and how they can advance, in concert and in tension, the goal of decentring our discipline.

Speakers

Paul Jaskot

Paul Jaskot specializes in Modern German Art History with a focus on the political significance of the Nazi period. He is a founding member of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative and co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab at Duke University.

Stephen Whiteman

Stephen Whiteman’s research focuses on the visual and spatial cultures of China in transcultural context, with particular interests in landscape, maps, and digital methods in the study of Asian art. He is currently Reader in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.