Planning on attending the CAA 2023 Annual Conference? We assembled a suggested Digital Humanities itinerary for your convenience!
First and foremost, you are welcome to join our very own Digital Art History Society session titled “Beyond Tidy Data: Critical Use of Museum Collections Information.” Come see us on Friday, February 17th, 09:00-10:30 am at the New York Hilton Midtown – Concourse – Concourse A.
Sessions (listed in temporal order)
Let’s Get Digital!
Wednesday, February 15, 2023 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Gramercy East
Let’s Get Digital embraces the timely opportunity to critically reexamine the impacts of digital technology and the barrage of information on our perceptions of reality. Specifically, this panel is focusing on digital art, history, curatorial strategies, critical theory, emergent platforms and forms of creative expression. In bringing together a panel of artists, scholars, and curators we hope to collectively reflect on our present post-internet age, to borrow Byung-Chul Han’s term, ‘the age of like’, and what it means to engage with the digital realm, over half-a-century since its inception.
The theoretical spectrum that may be used to critically examine these topics include Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Byung-Chul Han.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- New directions in digital art: Blockchains, sound directional art, computer generated art, transmedia, cybernetic art, alternative environments, interfaces, AR/VR.
- Virtual gallery engagement: curating, collecting, digitised collections, databases, virtual museums, multimedia installations.
- Multimedia story-telling: ecomedia, social media, journalism, docugames, games for change.
- Infrastructure and impact: privacy, security, influence, ethics
Chairs: Elyse Longair (Queen’s University, Department of Film and Media ) and Jevonne Peters (University of Western Ontario)
Presentations:
- Displacement Map: Challenges for Core Aesthetic Values in 3D Animation (Chaz Evans, University of South Carolina)
- Art in the Age of AI (Sarah Martin, University of Notre Dame)
- Ritual as Conduit Between Physical & Digital Realities (Megan Young, Indiana University Bloomington, Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design)
Women and NFT’s, Fostering an Understanding of the BlockChain, How to Create an NFT, and Navigating the Digital Market
Thursday, February 16, 2023 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM New York Hilton Midtown – 3rd Floor – Rendezvous Trianon
Chair: Marlo De Lara (AMDA College and Conservatory of Performing Arts)
Future Space, Trade and Capitalism in Digital Cities (New Media Caucus)
Thursday, February 16, 2023 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Gramercy West
Chair: Derek Larson (Purdue University)
Presentations: Future Space, Trade and Capitalism in Digital Cities (McKenzie Wark)
Digital Humanities and the Future of Art History (Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee)
Thursday, February 16, 2023 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM New York Hilton Midtown – 3rd Floor – Grand Ballroom West
Increasingly, humanists across disciplines are driving digital humanities projects. At the same time, data and digital visualizations have emerged as effective and efficient modes of developing and communicating information within and across myriad fields and sectors, within and without the academy and in various industries. Art historians and visual arts professionals have crucial knowledge about how representational choices inflect and communicate meaning, including within those projects that incorporate such visualizations, and yet they are infrequently involved in such initiatives. How might art historians leverage our training and abilities to think critically about visual literacy, histories of representation, data visualization, digital humanities, and the visual production of knowledge, and to more frequently enter into these enterprises and dialogues? Among other important attributes, might digital humanities and data visualization projects being developed in industries as diverse as medicine, video game design, and computer science constitute key pathways for professional practice for undergraduate majors and graduate students? And might visual arts professionals bring critical thinking about visuality’s entanglement with culture to such projects so as to more meaningfully attend to questions around equity and social justice? The Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee seeks papers or projects exploring the possibilities afforded by the intersection of art history and digital and data-driven projects, especially as they might shape thinking about the field and its professional praxes.
Chair: Heather Belnap (Brigham Young University)
Discussant: Kathleen Pierce
Presentations:
- AI and Objectivity: The Role of Humanistic Self-Criticality in Digital Humanities Research (Amanda Wasielewski, Stockholms Universitet)
- Visualizing Cities: Collaborative Approaches to Extended Reality (XR) (Victoria E. Szabo and Augustus Wendell, Duke University)
- A computational analysis of the transmission and impact of images in the periodical press (Nicola Carboni, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and Marie Barras, University of Geneva)
Digital Tools in Classroom (Mid-America College Art Association)
Thursday, February 16, 2023 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM Location currently unknown
As the pandemic progresses, virtual and in-person learning will continue to transform and adapt to the needs of students and reflect the digital future. How do educators use technology to promote student learning outcomes and boost their engagement? As we expand digital toolboxes, apps and platforms, how do educators provide learning flexibility while maintaining teaching effectiveness? This session seeks educators from all levels to share useful digital tools in classroom learning, critique discussion and more. Experience on successful and unsuccessful cases are both welcome
Chair: Chung-Fan Chang (Mid-America College Art Association)
Presentations:
- Welcome to the Server: Discord in the Classroom (Katherine Farley, University of Nevada at Las Vegas)
- Toolbox: Techno Reflection (Sandra Eula Lee, Franklin & Marshall College)
- Incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) in the Classroom (Qiuwen LI) Mapping the Critique in Digital Space (Xinyi Li and Gaia Scagnetti)
Beyond Tidy Data: Critical Use of Museum Collections Information
(Digital Art History Society)
Friday, February 17, 2023 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM New York Hilton Midtown – Concourse – Concourse A
Digital art historians frequently use collections information as data to inform their studies. Many cultural institutions, such as the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum, allow scholars to easily access and download their collections data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). It is necessary to “tidy” or “clean” this data, i.e. standardizing the format and terminology, before performing computational analysis or creating visualizations. However, proponents of critical museology increasingly acknowledge that “museums are not neutral,” to borrow a motto from La Tanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski. What does this exhortation mean for digital art historians? This session, sponsored by the Digital Art History Society, seeks participants from across academia, museums, libraries, and archives to interrogate the implications of institutional history for collections data and its usage. Topics may include collecting practices and provenance; curatorial bias; institutional neglect; selective or asymmetrical digitization; misidentification; and solutions for counteracting tendentiousness within museum data. We welcome contributions that address marginalized communities, regions, and media.
Chairs: Lindsay Dupertuis and Kelly Davis (Yale University)
Presentations:
- Artist Unknown: Hierarchy, Bias, and the Museum Database (Yael R. Rice, Amherst College)
- Mapping Senufo: Embracing Uncertain Details (Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Emory University, Constantine J. Petridis, Art Institute of Chicago and Joanna Mundy)
- Introducing Mrs. John Doe: Towards Feminist Agency in Provenance Data (Lynn Rother, Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Social Media: Medium/Exhibition Space/Cultural Context
Friday, February 17, 2023 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM New York Hilton Midtown – Concourse – Concourse A
How have social media shifted our understandings of art? Despite the fact that art making, display, and interpretation have moved not only online but onto social media, there has been little discussion of the implications of this new context for either creation or viewing. This session seeks to initiate a conversation amongst artists, curators, and historians who use social media in their practice. Of particular interest are studies that address the prehistory of artistic uses of social media and/or the ways it can recontextualize historical art; those that investigate questions of audience with an eye to race, class, and education, especially in comparison to museums; and descriptions the technical aspects of creating art for a specific platform. Broader studies of the platforms themselves are also welcome so long as they address the presence of art.
Chair: Tara L. Ward (The Pennsylvania State University)
Presentations:
- @dayanitasingh and the New Arts of Reconfiguration (Kyle Parry, University of California, Santa Cruz)
- On This Island: Shifting Curatorial Practices Within a (Post) Pandemic World (Erin Gordon, University of Texas at Austin)
- The Culture War Machine: Social Media and Aesthetic Activism (John Blakinger, University of Arkansas)
Don’t hesitate to email (info@digitalarthistorysociety.org) or Tweet us (@DigArtHistSoc) if we missed a session\presentation, we’ll gladly add them to the list!