The Digital Art History Society (DAHS) is delighted to have a call for proposals at next year’s 115th annual CAA conference in NYC. The Panel, entitled Tools, Texts, and Images — Reframing Visual Culture in the Digital Age, will be chaired by DAHS members Isabel Taube and Jennifer Henel.
Instructions for submission (a 250-word abstract and short CV due by August 31) are here:
https://caa.confex.com/caa/2027/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html
This session invites contributions that explore the evolving relationship between images, texts, and the digital tools that increasingly mediate their production, interpretation, and circulation. As visual culture undergoes rapid transformation, so too do the platforms, devices, and infrastructures through which images are created, annotated, published, and understood. This panel seeks to examine not only these changes, but also the historical conditions and conceptual frameworks that have shaped how we think with and through images.
Digital technologies are no longer external aids to scholarship or artistic practice; they are embedded within them. From image annotation environments to publishing platforms, cataloguing systems, and multimodal interfaces, tools actively structure the ways we engage visual material. These tools shape workflows, influence interpretation, and encode assumptions about the relationship between image and text.
The proliferation of tools raises critical questions: How do we navigate an increasingly fragmented ecosystem of platforms? What are the implications of idiosyncratic, project-specific tool development for collaboration, longevity, and standardization?
Issues of accessibility and orientation may be explored: What are the benefits and limitations of tools like alt text? What does it mean to design tools that accommodate broader publics while maintaining scholarly rigor?
Papers may also take a historicized perspective: How have past technologies—from print to early digital interfaces—conditioned contemporary approaches to images and text? What intellectual traditions inform current practices in digital publishing, especially as they challenge the primacy of prose and open new possibilities for object-based, multimodal scholarship?
Keywords:
Topics: Digital Humanities
Topics: Digital Scholarship/History
Medium: Digital Media (history and studio)
Topics: Technology
Topics: Intersectionality
Chairs: Isabel L. Taube and Jennifer Henel, Digital Art History Society