Please tell us about yourself
I co-direct the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. – I love holding a position that gives me an opportunity to operate in a space between the museum world and academia. This provides an opportunity to engage with new scholarship in addition to the general public to share those new ideas and insights through exhibitions and the publications that accompany them. My interest in Digital Art History grows out of a deeply seeded interest in the intersection between art and technology and the growth of interest in that area on the part of artists and technologists during the 1960s and its revival in the 1990s. It is exciting to see art historians—like humanists in other disciplines—engaging with new digital technologies to move forward their research, and I also like the interconnection this provides between the academy and the museum world, which has long been invested in the collection of data about works of art.
When and why was DAHS founded? What were your motivations?
The DAHS was originally launched in 2019 and was incorporated as a not-for-profit in 2021. It grew out of the conference “Art History in Digital Dimensions” hosted in 2016 at the University of Maryland and organized by the Meredith Gill of the Department of Art and Art History and Neil Fraistat of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). We recognized that art historians doing digital art history would benefit from a hub to share information with one another. We also felt that the DAHS could in turn help to generate opportunities to share new scholarship, further enriching the field. By establishing DAHS as a registered non-profit, and collecting dues, we hope that we can eventually build the resources to further support new scholarship.
How did the digital humanities shape your research?
The digital humanities demonstrated to me that digital tools could provide new interconnections between resources and new techniques for identifying meaningful patterns in data. DH thus provides new opportunities for connection and analysis. It is exciting, for example, that the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) makes it easy to compare and contrast objects across different institutions. – I also love the fact that a project such as the Virtual Asian American Art Museum can provide new visibility for the art of the Asian Diaspora in the United States. By pulling together holdings from multiple sources this tool provides a collective resource that amplifies what individual institutions have to offer and sheds light on their holdings as well as the work of individual artists. The Digital Humanities, in turn, provides tools for the analysis of individual artists. Finally, I am thrilled that the Digital Humanities are providing new tools to help museums and other publishers make scholarship more easily accessible through online tools as well as making related data available for further analysis.
What were the biggest challenges you have faced, and how did you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges is building comfort using new tools. I have been fortunate to be able to work with generous collaborators willing to share their technical knowledge. I believe that the relative novelty of new digital tools can also create impediments to widespread adoption. Another larger challenge is the development of metadata standards for the description of works of art. But I am pleased to note numerous efforts to address this, and particularly to attend with increasing sensitivity to redressing colonial terminologies that are both pejorative and inaccurate.
Why did you focus on art history-related digital humanities rather than all humanities fields?
My training is as an art historian and my interest in this arena grew out of my work on intersections between art and technology. Today I note interesting intersections between the work of some artists using data, such as R. Luke DuBois, and projects undertaken by scholars working in the field of digital art history. I particularly like the fact that Digital Art History encourages the development of new tools and new opportunities to work on the analysis of visual images through digital tools. Art History also provides the framework to analyze such images critically.
From the R. Luke DuBois project, photo by Lori Napoleon
What are DAHS’s goals for the upcoming years?
The DAHS is committed to serving members of the society. We are grateful to the leadership of Jennifer Henel in developing our new website, and we are grateful for the work done by our DAHS fellows—including Iris Gilad and Abigail Upshaw—to help bring new information forward about new projects. In coming years, I hope that DAHS will develop new opportunities to support digital art history projects and publications, with a particular emphasis on the work of emerging scholars.
Who would you like to meet in the next post of The Humans Behind Digital Humanities? You are more than welcome to send us suggestions and nominations.