Digital Art History is often described as a methodological addition to Art History. Moreover, it includes a profound transformation of the institutional framework: server rooms replaced the slide libraries as the former center of art historical departments, museums are concerned with digitizing their collections and making them accessible via virtual exhibitions, and conservators are facing challenges preserving digital art with its soft- and hardware.
The transition from analog to digital pictorial transcription has transformed art history and its archives in profound and unexpected ways. The objects of our study, once physically circumscribed by the walls of the slide library, are now widely available. The advent of image retrieval platforms like ArtStor and Google Image Search, not to mention countless museum databases, present new challenges and opportunities for cataloging and visualizing data. The photographic practices of museum visitors have likewise been transformed by the integration of digital photography, cell phones, and social media. Additionally, art historical publishing and pedagogy continue to be mostly constrained (in the English-speaking) world by antiquarian protocols governing copyright and image clearance.
For the upcoming call to the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) we ask for contributions on the following topics:
How are analog institutions transforming, and which digital tools steer this transformation? What practices persist, which ones are eliminated?
What nascent digital methodologies do museums and archives utilize to engage visitors, organize metadata, and document collections?
What ontological changes to reproductive artifacts accompany the structural transformations that art institutions have undergone in the past twenty years?
How might digital publishing, art-making, and experimentation challenge and change art-historical research?
What are digital opportunities to develop and document archives of underrepresented, neglected, or ephemeral traditions of image-making?
What can we learn from other institutions of other areas, with their obstacles and successes?
We welcome articles from art historians, curators, conservators, artists, information scientists, and authors from other related disciplines who are concerned with questions around this topic and work in art institutions.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2018. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.