Digital Humanities for art history 2022: A snapshot

Andrew Hopkins

The Summer School dedicated to Digital Humanities (DH) for Art History, held between
27 June and 1 July 2022 at the Department of Excellence of the Department of Human
Sciences (DSU Scienze Umane) of the Università degli studi dell’Aquila, represented a
singular opportunity for a snapshot of a discipline that, de facto, has only recently
managed to carve out a defined space for itself within academia. This, all the while for
decades having been a fundamental component of many research institutes’ activities and
at the same time acquiring a predominant role in the vast world of protection,
enhancement and dissemination of cultural patrimony. Yet, a fundamental primary
consideration regarded an obvious direction for the future of the DH in the context of
striving for carbon neutrality: the necessity for institutions to push forward with mass
digitisation so that scholars do not need to fly around the world to study unique objects
such as manuscripts, and the move to exclusively digital publishing in order to avoid
generating carbon footprints for books and journals: cfr. ‘COVID, CO2, and the future of
the Digital Humanities 2022’.
The possibility for ten scholarship holders to participate in a high-level summer
school dedicated to the possibilities that DH offers to the study of art history was ideal to
deepen understanding by up-and-coming practitioners of the potential of technologies in
research contexts tout court, and in this case spearheaded by an authoritative and
international parterre of presenters.
The choice of speakers with different backgrounds was also productive, because
their skills gave the participants a detailed and clear picture of the products resulting
from the intersection of their various knowledge bases. The presentation by Silvio Peroni
and Francesca Tomani (UNIBO), for example, provided – in a concise but effective way –
an explanation of how digital information is structured and related to each other within
platforms and which ones are the most suitable mechanisms to make these products
usable in terms of user experience: ‘Approaching Digital Humanities at university: A
cultural challenge’. The functionality and potential of data banks were illustrated through
the work of the DH.ARCH- Digital Humanities Advance Research Center of the
University of Bologna. The project presented was Zeri & Lode run in collaboration with
the foundation of the same name and was an exceptional example both for the amount of
data and for the management of the same.
The presentation by Teresa Nocita (DSU, UNIVAQ), focused on digital philology,
which was useful for highlighting the first major consequence of digitisation, that is, the
disappearance of the material data and the challenges that this phenomenon creates,
together with the ability of technologies to facilitate perception and learning of texts, as
demonstrated by the Hypertextual Decameron (later Web) project presented: ‘Between
visual art and visual text. Intermediality and hypertext: A possible combination for
twenty-first century philology’.

Journal of Art Historiography Number 27 December 2022

Andrew Hopkins Digital Humanities for art history 2022:
A snapshot

Several speakers’ presentations dealt with topics relating to DH in the cultural

heritage sector, according to an order that paved the way to understanding the state of
the art of research. Focused on the development of design data (BBA) and Computer
Aided were the interventions of Alessandro Adamou (Digital semantic, Web
delevopment, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome) ‘Shout LOUD on a road trip to
FAIRness: experience with integrating open research data at the Bibliotheca Hertziana’,
which focused on making the output of prior research readily available to humanists in
their interaction with digital resources; and by Elisa Batianello (Bibliotheca Hertziana,
Rome): ‘Digital Editions at the Bibliotheca Hertziana’, setting out how the institution is
investing lot of resources in order to improve the offer of digital publications, with the
support of new technologies such as neural text recognition. Crucial points include the
use of shared standards such as TEI XML and open-source platforms such as TEI
Publisher to ensure long-term accessibility and preservation.
The opportunities offered by new technologies on a cognitive and scientific level
for what concerns the historical-artistic, architectural and urbanistic sector were analysed
by Cristiana Pasqualetti (DSU, UNIVAQ): ‘Monumenti storici e artistici della città dell’Aquila
e suoi contorni by Angelo Leosini (1848) as a digital semantic corpus online’. This had
important parallels with another project referred to during the Summer School, that by
Rafael Brundo Uriarte (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence) who, over the past five
years, has been running the DH project creating a digital platform for Venetian Music
and the digitisation of the seventeenth century choir books of St. Mark’s (Cà Foscari
University, Venice).
The same was true of the ERC funded project by Ludovica Galeazzo’s (Università
degli studi di Padova), ‘Venice’s Nissology: Renaming the Lagoon City as an Archipelago
(VeNiss)’ which addressed the reconstruction of the artistic, architectural and urban
history of the city. The presentation of this project has identified and brought into the
light the fluid identity and participatory character of Digital Humanities as a discipline,
since it described step by step the process of elaboration of the platforms, starting from
research of a traditional system up to the creation of 3D models of registered emergencies
and georeferenced mapping. This was given extended consideration by Remo Grillo
(Villa I Tatti, Florence), ‘Representing change: User interaction and data modelling of an
identity paradox’, whereby the challenge of representing historical data, especially true
for objects whose identity undergoes several changes – both physical and functional –
over time, such as historic buildings, is in the context of the VeNiss project, subjected to a
technical conceptualisation of the philosophical problem of identity over time through the
lens of the Cidoc-CRM, providing an outline of a data model and a UX/UI solution, both
adopted to represent knowledge about the nuanced historical changes of buildings over
time.
Both national and international projects were presented, aimed at the
development of search engines and iconographic recognition, relational databases and
geo-localised platforms dedicated to the knowledge of specific episodes of cultural
heritage, both tangible and intangible. One such was by Franziska Lampe (Zentralinstitut
für Kunstgeschichte, Munich), ‘Activate the Archive: Photographic art reproductions
from the Bruckmann Verlag and their potential digital futures’. The most significant data
that emerged during this presentation of concerned the advantages offered through the

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Andrew Hopkins Digital Humanities for art history 2022:
A snapshot

use of technology in the process of collecting and organising the material and its study,
which can be translated into enormous savings (obviously for those who use the
platforms), as well as time and economic, physical and mental resources given the
negligible time to access an enormous amount of information already connected and
related to each other, more remotely. To this is added an advantage also on a
methodological level, as the products created were developed according to aggregative
criteria and different technologies, illustrating the variety of organisation and
management systems for data, whose singularity is inscribed in the ability within virtual
environments to return data to users in its entirety, even material, through innovative
tools, such as that identified by Lampe in navigation by colour and by visual similarity.
Andrew Hopkins (Università degli studi dell’Aquila), in ‘Flying to the moon, or
flying too close to the sun: Failure in the Digital Humanities’, opened Pandora’s box
regarding the general incapacity or willingness to share hard-won wisdom regarding the
DH, even in the context of scholarly and academic institutions. Yet this cone of silence
and evasion impedes progress, without question, yet it is not clear at all what can be done
about this issue if institutional figures feel they cannot talk about it. A personal timeline
about the period in question is recounted in ‘Digital Humanities 1981–2021: A personal
timeline’, which perhaps can serve as a reference in the future for historiography as
experienced by an art and architectural historian.
It is useful to close with what one interlocutor, Gail Feigenbaum, emerita of the
Getty Research Institute, had to say about what she described as wondrous experiments
or notes on the cultural life of the Digital Humanities:

The crucial challenges of the Digital Humanities may be cultural, rather than
technical. Based on two decades of involvement with digital endeavours at the
Getty Research Institute (GRI), this argument can be made with confidence.
Successful integration of the digital into the research environment of an arts
institution, and even the outcome of any individual project, hinge on cultural and
social factors, not technical ones. This is a red thread that surely resonates with
more experienced colleagues. This observation was made two decades ago by a
pair of pioneers in digital scholarly publishing, Ron Musto and Eileen Gardiner,
founders of Italica Press. At the time they were launching a series of history
monographs as EBooks for the American Council of Learned Societies. Progress
was proving difficult. The challenge was not technological, they explained, the
problems were with people. Twenty years later this remains relevant. Digital art
history, in particular, plays out in an environment made unstable by shifting
theoretical perspectives and fast-changing trends. The outcome of any digital
undertaking, whether it be a single project, or a policy of institutional integration,
depends less on coding than on professional formation and attitudes, workplace
culture, on sociological factors. Certain attitudes and dynamics may be systemic
rather than specific to any particular endeavor. Alertness to these can help in
navigating complicated waters. It is a firm conviction that now, and in the future,
the digital plays an incalculably valuable, exciting, and important role in the study
of art and architecture.

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Andrew Hopkins Digital Humanities for art history 2022:
A snapshot

A few years ago the digital took on a renewed vitality when the Getty’s
board of directors mandated a policy of “digital first,” definitively signaling an
institutional priority. New energy was injected into some excellent projects
already underway. Among these was the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly
Catalog initiative, (OSCI) – to my mind one of most consequential experiments for
the field, involving ten museums. OSCI was one of the rare projects to grapple
productively and explicitly with the cultural challenges of the digital alongside the
technical. Valuable outcomes resulted from this carefully and thoughtfully
conceived initiative, and basic lessons were learned. For me one critical lesson was
that sustainability is a major and pervasive challenge. Another obvious lesson was
that the digital seems to jump ahead most noticeably when spurred by injections
of capitol. The “digital first” imperative declared at the Getty smoothed the path
to support for projects, grants, staff, and training. New projects were quickly
brought on, such as the Getty Research Portal, which succeeded beyond
expectations. The Portal was the brainchild of GRI director Thomas Gaeghtgens,
who forged an international partnership of art history libraries to provide access
to hundreds of thousands of digitised books on art history no longer protected by
copyright. The Portal offers one-stop shopping to consult or download in full text
multiple copies and editions of books from Bellori to Wölfflin, held by the Getty
and by a consortium of partners such as Heidelberg University. During the
pandemic huge numbers of scholars found that the Portal made it possible to find
and search inside seventeenth-century guidebooks to Rome, or an array of early
twentieth-century books on art history.

Andrew Hopkins holds the chair in architectural history at the Università degli studi
dell’Aquila and is the author of several studies to do with Baroque architecture and
historiography.
Email: andrewjames.hopkins@univaq.it

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