Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3

Presentations ................................................................................................................................. 4

Morning Session 1: Mapping Images ............................................................................................... 4 Re-visioning the Archive: The Photogrammar Project ................................................................. 4 When and Where Did They Paint? Schematizing Landscape with the Inventory of American Paintings........................................................................................................................................ 5 Computational Analysis of Andy Warhol’s Flowers ...................................................................... 7

Insights from the Q&A .............................................................................................................. 9

Morning Session 2: Networks and Contexts .................................................................................. 10 Visualizing Schneemann ............................................................................................................. 10 Documenting the Postwar Audience for American Avant-Garde Art ........................................ 11 The Warhol Timeweb: Visualizing Connectivity as Investigative Research and Transdisciplinary Pedagogy ..................................................................................................................................... 12

Insights from the Q&A ............................................................................................................ 13

Afternoon Session 1: Curating Online ........................................................................................... 14 Student Curators Online: African American Close-Up ................................................................ 14 Recontextualizing the Peacock Room: “The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact” Website and “The Peacock Room Comes to America” Mobile App ............ 15

Insights from the Q&A ............................................................................................................ 16

Afternoon Session 2: Publishing Online ......................................................................................... 17 Writing Searching ....................................................................................................................... 17 Two Digital Projects in American Landscape Design History ..................................................... 18 Art History Online: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide’s Digital Research and Publishing Initiative ...................................................................................................................................... 20

Insights from the Q&A ............................................................................................................ 21

Frequent Threads and Themes ...................................................................................................... 22

Workshop ..................................................................................................................................... 25 Collaborations and Projects ........................................................................................................ 25 Other Resources ......................................................................................................................... 26

Appendix A: Workshop Attendees………………………………………………………………………………………………..28

Appendix B: Workshop Structure………………………………………………………………………………………………….31

Appendix C: Events and Resources in Digital Art History……………………………………………………………….32 Digital Humanities Summer Institutes, Workshops, Camps for Art Historians .......................... 33 Art History Publications Showcasing Digital Scholarship ........................................................... 33 Essay Prizes for Exemplary Online Scholarly Research and Presentation .................................. 33

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INTRODUCTION

This report summarizes the presentations, discussions and common themes that emerged from the American Art History and Digital Scholarship symposium and workshop organized by the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.1 The full day symposium, which was held on November 15, 2013 at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington, D.C., showcased the work of eleven scholars in four distinct categories: “Mapping Images,” “Networks and Contexts,” “Curating Online,” and “Publishing Online.” The half-day workshop that followed the symposium offered a smaller group of scholars an opportunity to explore shared interests and collaborations in digital scholarship and American art. Both the symposium and workshop were made possible by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Why this Symposium?

Archives of American Art Deputy Director Liza Kirwin gave some background about the origins and goals of the symposium. Citing the Kress report Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, Its Research Centers and Digital Scholarship as an impetus for this event, she spoke about burrowing through the report’s footnotes to see “what the digital frontier looked like,” and speculated on various “What if?” scenarios that digital scholarship might bring about for teaching and research in American art history. The Archives of American Art decided to highlight the potential of American art and digital scholarship more formally through a symposium format, and hoped to prompt greater exploration in this area through a workshop. To that end, the Archives invited the participation of scholars whose “innovative use of digital tools augment traditional art historical methodologies and contribute new knowledge to enduring issues in the field.” Although the focus of the symposium was American art history, Archives Director Kate Haw acknowledged larger considerations as well. She hoped the event would identify future directions in art history and digital humanities, foster greater collaboration among art history students, teachers, archivists, scholars and information technology specialists, and help scholarly research centers (such as the Archives) better position their own digital resources to address new research questions emerging from digital scholarship. Speaking from her position as Archives director, Haw welcomed ideas and insights that would make the Archives a more effective partner in digital scholarly research. Kelly Quinn, Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives, served as the moderator of this event. Describing her unofficial title as “intellectual matchmaker,” Quinn put her matchmaking skills into practice over the course of the two days, providing numerous

1 This report supplements other reviews and comments that emerged from the symposium in the form of blog postings, papers, and tweets. A list of these dialogs and writings can be found at http://storify.com/dzorich/american-art-history-and-digital-scholarship-1. Complete webcasts of the proceedings are available on the Archives of American Art’s YouTube channel. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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opportunities for participants to meet informally, organizing “birds of a feather” interest groups, and giving voice to the undercurrents of ideas and themes that cut across the day’s presentations and discussions.

PRESENTATIONS

MORNING SESSION 1: MAPPING IMAGES

Re-visioning the Archive: The Photogrammar Project Laura Wexler (@laura_wexler) Professor of American Studies & Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Yale University Lauren Tilton (@NOLauren) Ph.D. Student in American Studies, Yale University Laura Wexler introduced the Photogrammar Project and the Farm Security Administration Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) collection that underlies it. This renowned collection of 170,000 photographs documents American life between 1935-1944. Located in the Library of Congress, the collection includes the works of such eminent photographers as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, and others. These photographers initially were hired to document New Deal works underway during the Depression, but their efforts grew to encompass photo documentation of sharecroppers in the South, minority migrant workers in the West and Midwest, and urban and rural conditions.2 Although the collection is heavily used, its sheer size precludes examinations that might reveal larger patterns and themes that crosscut the materials. The Photogrammar Project makes such explorations possible. For example, one of the Project’s first experiments was to map the distribution of all the photographs in this collection. The results were eye opening. The common perceptions of Depression-era imagery focus on iconic areas and events, such as the Deep South or the Dust Bowl. But the mapping analysis showed a photographic distribution that swept across the entire United States: FSA photographers crisscrossed the length and breadth of the country, photographing at every step of the way. All their photographs were sent to the FSA, but the agency chose to release only a subset. It is this subset defines our popular perceptions of what the Depression “looked like”. Findings such as this one have led Wexler to view the FSA photography collection as a simulacrum. Historically, the FSA photographs have been interpreted as an authentic portrait of American life during an important period in our history, but it is really a partial and highly edited portrayal. The Photogrammar Project’s mapping efforts are clarifying and revealing the full picture.

2 For further information about the US government photography project that produced this collection, the photographers who took part, and the collection itself, see “Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives” Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Before turning over the presentation to her colleague, Wexler spoke briefly about the Photogrammar Project team, which included a statistician, a GIS specialist, a professor/historian of photography, and a graduate student with experience in museums and an interest in public history. The statistician proved to be a critical team member: his ability to see meaning in groups of numbers, and to work with visual data and metadata, was invaluable to interpreting this dataset. Wexler’s own role as principal investigator was to “make the team understand it was a team.” Together the partners spent three years building the tool, and are now exploring new ways to use it. Lauren Tilton demonstrated Photogrammar’s current and future capabilities. Expanding on Wexler’s comments about the Project helping to shift scholarly assumptions about the FSA collection, she demonstrated how Photogrammar could layer historical maps over the collections’ data to offer details such as a photographer’s travel route over time. Other features include the ability to select a county on a map and determine the numbers of photographs taken in that county, and the ability to examine those photographs to explore questions such as why one county may be photographed more frequently than another. The collection can be searched at very granular levels because the photographs are accompanied by a rich set of metadata. But some of this metadata is difficult to interpret, and the team hopes that scholars may be able to clarify some of the outstanding issues. For example, why was a hierarchical classification system established for the collection in the 1940s applied to similar photographs in a different manner? How was this system applied? The team statistician did successfully decipher one unusual piece of metadata - a seemingly cryptic number assigned to each of the photographs that turned out to be photo strip numbers. This finding now makes it possible for the photographs to be visually displayed in the order in which they were taken, enabling a host of new research possibilities. Users now can “travel” along with the photographer and observe the order in which he shot his photographs, switched his themes, altered the framing of shots from one photograph to the next, etc. Future versions of Photogrammar may include tools that allow visualizations of the collection by classification systems, text mining using the photograph captions, and image analysis on the color photographs.3 They also are considering a mobile platform, crowdsourcing features, and sound capabilities. The code for the toolset is open source and soon will be placed on GitHub4 for others to use with their projects and datasets.

When and Where Did They Paint? Schematizing Landscape with the Inventory of American Paintings David Sledge (@dsledge__) M.A. Student in Art History, Williams College

3 See Photogrammar “Browse by Classification” http://photogrammar.yale.edu/browse/ 4 GitHub is a code-sharing and publishing repository that has become popular with open source software developers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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David Sledge’s inquiry into art historical data analysis began with a painting by the 19th century artist James Cameron of Colonel James Whiteside and his family.5 Located in the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cameron’s painting depicts the prosperous Colonel, his wife, their son, and two slaves on a balcony overlooking a densely packed panorama of the Tennessee River and its surrounding landscape. Included in this landscape are a railroad (one of the sources of Whiteside‘s personal wealth), and the then-growing city of Chattanooga (of which Whiteside was mayor). The features in this panorama convey the Colonel’s wealth, status and boosterism of the region. Sledge’s interest in the painting led him to think about painters of this era. Who were Cameron’s peers? What was the nature of artistic communities in Tennessee and in other regions of America in the 19th century, and how can we examine their growth? What new tools and databases might be available to help us study these questions at a broader level? Sledge turned to a well-known resource – the Inventory of American Paintings, compiled and maintained by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Inventory is a guide to more than 300,000 American paintings located in public and private collections in the US and in foreign countries. It takes an agnostic approach to American art, including all American paintings in its database regardless of perceived quality or value. The Inventory is well known for the rich metadata that accompanies each entry. The entry for the Cameron painting, for example, has standard “tombstone” data such as artist name, date, and type of painting, as well as richer subject information and details on the figures and landscapes. With the permission of the Inventory6 staff, and with the assistance of a fellow student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT, Sledge created a script that extracted data from the Inventory’s database (which is structured for single entry inquiry) into a format that he could use to examine the data in its entirety, and process and visualize it in different ways. Once he had the data in a manipulable form, he set about analyzing it by region. He found, for example, that the Inventory contains about 95 works that depict the state of Tennessee. He examined the distribution of these paintings over time and discovered that few artists depicted the state before 1850, but a surge of artists began to do so after this date. But when comparing this surge with depictions of other southern states, he found the Tennessee depictions actually came about at a much slower rate than depictions of other southern states over the same period of time. What might account for these findings? Sledge also examined Inventory data to identify the cities most frequently depicted in 19th century American art. Unsurprisingly, New York City came in first, but Venice, Italy and Paris, France ranked second and third. Sledge (and the audience) expressed surprise at this finding. Why were Venice and

5 See “Colonel and Mrs. James A. Whiteside, son Charles and Servants”, Hunter Museum of American Art, http://www2.huntermuseum.org/gallery/91/cameron/colonel-and-mrs-james-a-whiteside-son-charles-and-servants/?sortBy=artist_lastname&perPage=36. 6 Some data in the Inventory of American Art must be restricted because of privacy concerns, so permission was granted to use the data for research and educational uses with privacy restrictions intact. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Paris so popular among American artists at this time? Are the results reflective of 19th century publications? Do they expose lacunae in art historical scholarship? Again, his visualizations brought forth more questions than answers. Sledge provided additional examples of regional comparisons of artistic communities, comparing Boston’s community to New York’s; illustrating the frequency in depictions of European cities; and demonstrating the rise and fall of depictions of major parks and recreation areas. Each of these inquiries brought forth more questions than answers. Sledge was not surprised by this proliferation of questions, noting that visualizations cannot capture the richness, diffusion and fluidity of artistic movements – it can only hint at them. Additional research, using other art historical tools and methodologies, is needed to examine these issues more fully. Sledge’s analysis of the Inventory of American Art data arose organically from his interests in how 19th century American artists depict their communities. The data he is examining is not new, but the way he is organizing and displaying it (visually and schematically) reveals new observations and more pointed questions about the reach of an artistic community over time. He defines these efforts as a starting point for new research in this area, and characterizes it as a “work in progress.”

Computational Analysis of Andy Warhol’s Flowers Marian Mazzone Professor of Art History, College of Charleston Thomas Brady B.S. Student in Computer Science, College of Charleston Marian Mazzone and Thomas Brady’s research on Andy Warhol’s flower paintings emerged from Mazzone’s interest in how the methods and tools of art history might work with those of computer science to formulate new insights. As Mazzone began exploring image processing and art analysis, she quickly realized that computer science scholarship in this area focused on two aspects: 1) attribution, which involves finding the ‘hand” of the artist or attributing new works to an artist (also called “stylometry”)7 and 2) differentiating styles among large databases of images, such as those found in art history departments, museums, libraries or other repositories. Neither of these areas was compelling to Mazzone, whose own interests lie in contemporary materials. But as an art historian, she was curious about how she might address image processing and art differently than a computer scientist. What might she contribute to this kind of work?

7 Mazzone cited the work of Daniel Rockmore, Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, who was an early investigator of stylometry analysis with works of art, and discussed his application of this method on the drawings of Bruegel. See James M. Hughes, Daniel J. Graham, Daniel N. Rockmore. 2010. “Quantification of artistic style through sparse coding analysis in the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 107(4): 1279. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/04/0910530107.full.pdf+html American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Mazzone’s research into image processing led her to articulate an obvious but critical truth: “computers do not have eyeballs.” Their recognition of images is rudimentary, especially with complex images like works of art. So Mazzone began looking for a test case, “a visual matchup” between objects that could be analyzed within the limits of current computer processing capabilities. After some consideration, she settled on Warhol’s flower series for two important reasons. First, there are a large number of works in this series, and the larger the sample size, the more accurate the results. Second, these paintings differ significantly in scale, color, and composition but retain a simplicity that might work well within the current limits of image processing. Once she settled on these works as her test case, Mazzone investigated how she might detect patterns of change or “choices” in Warhol’s flowers paintings. Is there a pattern to how Warhol varied the flowers’ colors, the paintings’ background colors, or the rotation of the flowers over the timespan of the series? Did he routinely use certain combinations, and if so, are these associated with sizes or other characteristics? She suspected Warhol’s choices were not random, and was looking for a method that would provide some empirical proof and resolution to these questions. Because computers work most effectively with numbers, Mazzone’s computer science partner, Thomas Brady, developed a strategy, algorithms, and code to convert the flowers’ visual information into numeric data for processing. Brady discussed the process used to identify the colors in the flower paintings and the code he wrote (in the Python programming language) to accurately assign numeric color values to each flower. The resulting values were stored in a spreadsheet where they can be analyzed more efficiently and combined with other numerical data (such as the sale price of the works). These efforts now make it possible to count the works by colors and by combinations of other characteristics (such as flower size) in the paintings. Mazzone and Brady are combining their visual analysis with a monetary analysis (based on sales data from a catalog raisonné of Warhol’s work). Using Gephi, an open source software program for visualizing and analyzing large network graphs, Mazzone demonstrated how some of Warhol’s 22-inch flower paintings passed through various galleries and individual collections (their “chain of provenance”.) They plan to examine sales by multiple criteria (e.g., color, size, number, etc.) and make visible a complicated pattern of exchange that would be otherwise undeterminable. They also will be adding Warhol’s flower prints to their dataset and examining the exchange networks of these works as well. For Mazzone, an exploration of what network analysis can reveal about the sales and monetary value of Warhol’s works is just the beginning. Is there a connection between production and marketing in contemporary art that may be based on Warhol’s own ideas and work? Can Warhol’s work offer a model that is instructive and predictive of contemporary art production in general? If so, can this model be applied to the works of other contemporary artists (e.g., Damien Hirst)? As they move forward on their research, Mazzone and Brady also are testing the robustness of their tools, with an eye towards developing a toolkit that can help address these types of questions.

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Insights from the Q&A The Inaccuracy of Datasets Several individuals in the audience spoke about the inaccuracy of datasets. Image datasets are particularly problematic because they are surrogates of original works that are pixelated and translated into number sets for computer analysis, resulting in multiple levels of “noise” getting introduced into the analysis. Text datasets, like the Inventory of American Paintings, also can be problematic, as they often consist of unverified data from myriad sources. These issues call into question the validity of interpretations based on this data. The speakers noted that the issue of “dirty” data is endemic to the digital humanities and there are different schools of thought about whether to proceed with what you have or “clean it up”. They also emphasized that inaccurate data can be an opening to research. The computer science partners involved in several of the projects were intrigued by the possibilities such data offered. Thomas Brady spoke about how he was drawn to the Warhol flowers project by the “messiness” of the art historical data and a wish to explore what computer science methodology might offer for research in this area. Laura Tilton spoke about how inaccurate and outlier data in the FSA collections was the “hook” that drew their statistician into the Photogrammar project. Mazzone cautioned that because “computers do not have eyeballs” it is critically important for art historians to clarify what they want to analyze with images and then configure their inquiry in a way the computer can assess. With the Warhol flowers project, she and Brady attached a range of numbers to colors and identified one range of numbers as blue, another range as red, etc. The computer then was asked to differentiate sets of numbers, because it cannot “see” or detect colors. However, Mazzone did note that computers can detect shapes, edges, and textures in images. John Resig’s innovative Japanese Woodblock Print Search8 takes advantage of this capability, as does the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gallery One. The Many Forms and Approaches to Collaboration Discussions about collaboration highlighted the importance of tapping into human networks and conducting outreach beyond one’s own circle of peers. It also revealed that successful collaboration occurs at different scales of participation. The Photogrammar Project is NEH-funded and draws from professionals and students across Yale University. By contrast, Mazzone/Brady and Sledge’s collaborations were more modest in scope but serve them equally well. Mazzone knew she would need computer science expertise, so she approached a colleague in the computer science department at her college for advice and was put in touch with Brady. Sledge, whose interests arose from his graduate study, reached out to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for permission to use

8 During the Q&A period, Louisa Wood Ruby of the Frick Art Library noted that Resig was applying the same process he used on his work on Ukiyo-e prints to match up images in the Frick’s photographic archives. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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data from the Inventory of American Art, and partnered informally with a friend (a graduate student at MIT) who could provide the technical expertise he needed to extract data from this database.

MORNING SESSION 2: NETWORKS AND CONTEXTS

Visualizing Schneemann Michelle Moravec (@professormoravec) Associate Professor of History, Rosemont College Melissa Rogers (@melissarogers17) Ph.D. Student in Women’s Studies, University of Maryland

The correspondence of avant-garde artist Carolee Schneemann prompted Michelle Moravec to ask what these letters might reveal about Schneemann’s contacts and influences, and how they might clarify Schneemann’s position as a female artist in a largely male milieu. To explore these areas further, Moravec employed the methodologies of network analysis and corpus linguistics9 to examine the correspondence.

Moravec’s dataset of several hundred letters came from Kristine Stiles’ edited volume of Schneemann’s 1956-1999 correspondence.10 Extracting this corpus from Stiles’ work and getting into a form that was amenable to data analysis involved some preliminary cleanup and manipulation. Once this was accomplished, Moravec ran the corpus through a named entity recognition (NER) software program that tagged places, names, and organizations. She then ran the data through RAW to yield network visualizations and Antconc to generate a linguistics analysis11 of Schneemann’s letters.12 Preliminary visualizations of network patterns show that the letters are international in scope and are addressed largely to other artists. Three key friendships – with the musician James Tenny (Schneemann’s first husband), the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and the poet Clayton Eshleman – are heavily represented in the correspondence. In general, both the correspondence and its content tilt heavily toward male figures. Moravec’s corpus linguistics analysis looked at “collocates” (words that appear together at a rate of

9 “The study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of ‘real world’ text.” See “Corpus Linguistics”, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics. 10 Stiles, Kristine. Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle. Duke University Press, 2010. 11 Moravec gives a fuller account of this project, including a more detailed description of the methodology she employed, on her blog History and the City, http://historyinthecity.blogspot.com/2013/11/before-i-start-i-want-to-thank-people.html 12 Moravec elaborated on her choice of tools during the Q and A. She chose Antconc because it is a Mac-based tool for linguistic analysis (Wordsmith would be the Windows’ equivalent.) She chose RAW rather than Gephi for her network visualizations because RAW’s visualizations are clearer and easier to demonstrate in presentations. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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frequency greater than chance) and “keywords” (unusually frequent words in a corpus, as measured against a reference corpus). Among her key findings is that the collocate word “past” is strongly associated with Schneemann’s attempts to place herself within the past and present world of feminist art. Moravec’s sample size represents a small percentage of Schneemann’s total correspondence (the Schneemann archive at the Getty Center consists of 19 boxes of materials), so she is hesitant to make definitive statements at this time. Future research will incorporate more of the correspondence as well as Schneemann’s published work, and Moravec also hopes to examine Schneemann’s role in the larger feminist community. Melissa Rogers’s collaboration with Moravec had its origins at a THATCamp Feminism forum where they discussed their mutual interest in Schneemann. Rogers is interested in the more ephemeral aspects of Schneemann’s work, particularly her mail art and its relationship to her performances, films, and assemblages. Hoping that an interactive exhibit could address the visual richness of Schneemann’s letters and their content, Rogers wanted to experiment with visual storytelling to bring about a fuller understanding of Schneemann’s work. Moving forward on these interests, Rogers discovered Omeka and its mapping/timeline add-on, Neatline, and hoped these tools might offer a useful portal for curatorial interpretation and archival description of Schneemann’s work. Unfortunately, her experience with these tools proved disappointing. Rogers described them as “clunky” and unsuitable for her needs. She also felt the technical infrastructure and expertise needed to install these products was beyond an average user’s capabilities, and found the associated hosting costs more than she could afford. Nevertheless, she remains committed to her belief that an interactive exhibit of Schneemann’s work offers a unique way to capture the wealth of material ephemera that can help scholars interpret Schneemann’s life and work, and is looking for collaborators to explore ways to make this idea possible.

Documenting the Postwar Audience for American Avant-Garde Art Titia Hulst Ph.D. Candidate, New York University Titia Hulst chronicled the journey of how she became an “accidental” digital art historian while researching the subject of her dissertation: the famed gallerist Leo Castelli. Her initial investigations into Castelli’s background and influence led her to conclude that he was an unreliable source of his own activity and influence in the art world of the 1960s. How was she to evaluate Castelli’s own claims, and the claims of many others who wrote about him, that he defined the aesthetic of this period? She decided to study the broader art market in which Castelli operated to understand what was really happening during this time period. Using invoices and correspondence from several galleries (whose archives are located in the Archives of American Art), Hulst harvested over 20,000 art sales transactions from this period. She compiled the information in a spreadsheet and conducted initial American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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analyses such as comparing sales figures to GDP trends, looking at market share by gallery, and identifying the top-selling artists by gallery. These analyses revealed some interesting insights (e.g., the influence of the Martha Jackson Gallery was much greater than imagined; Castelli’s top selling artists came to him from other galleries), but also generated new questions about the distributions by region. To explore these questions further she needed a more robust tool than spreadsheet software. She discovered ArcGIS and used it to map the purchases of the American Avant Garde art documented in the invoices. From this analysis she discovered that Castelli was operating in the same markets as other galleries, despite his claims to the contrary. Hulst also was curious about the notion of “taste” and how this sentiment influences the market. What were art buyers looking for in a work of art? Would their “taste” yield insights about how the market for Pop art came about? To explore these questions further, she grouped images of the artworks sold during this period into categories she felt may reflect something about taste (e.g., “cool” abstraction, figurative works, anthropomorphic or fantasy works, etc.), and then examined which galleries sold works in these categories. Castelli was shown to have sold far more figurative works than is usually assumed. Hulst next turned to network analysis to examine the sphere of collectors/customers who purchased from various galleries in the 1960s. Using Cytoscope, an open source program for visualizing complex networks, she discovered that Castelli’s particular network was small when compared to other galleries operating at the time, but it was more tightly connected and included a greater number of major collectors and European collectors than did other galleries. Hulst summed up her experiences in digital art history by emphasizing how much trial and error is involved in the exploration process when using digital tools. Although these tools can reveal patterns and interactions, ultimately it was the questions Hulst asked of the data that provided her with further insight and “next steps”, and led her to a greater understanding of Castelli’s role in the art world.

The Warhol Timeweb: Visualizing Connectivity as Investigative Research and Transdisciplinary Pedagogy Jessica Gogan Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pittsburgh and Project Curator, The Warhol Timeweb Tresa Varner Curator of Education & Interpretation, The Andy Warhol Museum The Warhol Timeweb is an online resource that uses the art and life of Andy Warhol as a springboard for exploring larger sociocultural currents in American history. Jessica Gogan described the Timeweb as an effort to promote, connect and diversify authorship about Warhol and his work. Developed by the Warhol Museum, the tool uses 50 of Warhol’s works and moments from his life as points of departure for mapping other social and historical events, people, places, and ideas. The Timeweb was conceived in 2005, and embraces the Museum’s mission and desire to enhance the American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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use of its online resources, encourage global connections and content, and continue the spirit of Warhol’s own experimental endeavors. It is a collaborative effort, engaging a cross-disciplinary team from the Museum and across academia to research, write, and review connections between Warhol’s work/life and larger cultural phenomena, and to build a tool that helps users explore these connections. Tresa Varner demonstrated a beta version of the Timeweb.13 The resource presents relationships using the nodes and connections’ schemas commonly used in representations of network analyses. A group of relationships are called “webs,” and webs form a point of departure for exploring other connections. The web around Warhol’s “Jackie” paintings, for example, can lead down a path that explores Jackie Kennedy’s life, the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1960s, the role of television in the Kennedy era, the Peace Corps, the Kennedy assassination, or Warhol’s own process in creating the “Jackie” works. Pathways are nonlinear and thus cross time and space. The Timeweb’s content is drawn from the Warhol Museum, as well as from libraries, archives and museums, artists’ studios and estates, and photo repositories. Envisioned as a continuously growing resource, its goal is to educate and stimulate new scholarship. The Timeweb team will add historical material as it becomes available, but they also hope users will create their own connections and researchers will contribute their scholarly insights. A key task for the Timeweb team is to create the web connections: this process clarifies the cultural forces at play and forms the basis of a cross disciplinary pedagogy that addresses how Warhol’s art reflects and shapes forces in contemporary life. Developing the connections is often a messy undertaking, but they offer a vital way to test ideas, incorporate new information, and present new questions for consideration. The Warhol Museum will be using the Timeweb in its own exhibits and projects to improve the visitor experience. However, its real purpose is to promote broader social interactions and engagement. Warhol’s work is immensely popular both here and abroad, but most Warhol admirers will never get a chance to physically visit the Museum. The Timeweb in one way to keep Warhol’s art relevant in the 21st century and beyond by letting users create connections that are relevant to their interests, and by providing scholars with a publishing platform for Warhol research.

Insights from the Q&A Reproducing Research Results A question about tool selection and workflow led to a broader discussion of the replicability of results derived from digital tools and methodologies. Altering the parameters of a network analysis in Gephi,

13 The site will receive a soft launch in January of 2014, and an official launch (in conjunction with the re-opening of the Warhol Museum) in May 2014. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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for example, will produce entirely different visualization results on the same dataset. How can one establish the trustworthiness of research efforts when this is the case? Moravec felt transparency was key. Researchers must be clear about the datasets they use and the inputs and settings used with their research tools. To this end, she proposed that visualizations should come with a legend, much like the ones on a map, that identifies the particular settings and parameters that were used when generating the visualization.

AFTERNOON SESSION 1: CURATING ONLINE

Student Curators Online: African American Close-Up Richard J. Powell John Spencer Bassett Professor, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University Richard Powell turned to digital tools to change the way his students learn. He was prompted by his frustrations with the increasingly formulaic nature of undergraduate student papers. These papers incorporate information gathered largely from the Internet, and reiterate this information without saying anything new. Moreover, they fail to demonstrate any type of real learning or creativity. Powell wanted his students to move beyond information gathering to knowledge creation, and in the process gain a deeper engagement with art. Working with Duke University’s Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge and Nasher Museum of Art, Powell rethought a course he routinely teaches on modern and contemporary African American Art, structuring it around the creation of a virtual exhibit. This exhibit - African American Close-Up – included works that were described, analyzed and interpreted by students in this course. In preparing for this course, Powell was determined to have his students observe artworks in a face-to-face setting and not just on the web, so he identified works that were located within a reasonable radius of the university. In the end, he selected 38 objects (mostly prints, drawings, and other works on paper) for the exhibit from various local public and private collections, procured images for these works, and resolved permissions issues so that they could be displayed online. The exhibit was created on a WordPress platform using the Infinity theme: the latter was selected for its ability to provide multiple presentations of high-resolution images and for its image tagging capabilities. Once this groundwork was laid, Powell presented the artworks to his students and gave them an assignment to select a work, see it in person, and conduct original research on their selection. To guide them through the research process, he instructed them to do the following with their selection: describe the work, conduct background research on the work and its creator, detail their personal feelings or assumptions about the work, and then encapsulate all this information into a 500 word summary that would form the work’s online entry. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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As they worked on their assignments, many students were challenged by the process of describing a work of art and by the idea of expressing their own thoughts about it. Although they did not realize it at the time, the students were working through a process of creating their own content and knowledge. As the semester progressed, the students added critiquing to their skills, reviewing each other’s entries in a collaborative manner. Powell briefly showed two particular works to give an overview of the exhibit and to highlight the richness and rigor of the students’ entries.14 In evaluating this course, Powell believes the experience successfully moved his students away from perfunctory reports and towards a deeper experience and understanding of works of American art through a process of seeing, describing, analyzing and articulating. He credited digital technology with reinvigorating his teaching and prompting him to think about new ways to engage his students in American art.

Recontextualizing the Peacock Room: “The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact” Website and “The Peacock Room Comes to America” Mobile App Lee Glazer Associate Curator of American Art, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Maya Foo Museum Specialist (Curatorial), Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Lee Glazer introduced new efforts underway to revitalize the Peacock Room, an iconic object located in the Smithsonian’s Freer Sackler Gallery (FSG). The Peacock Room is a period room, and by its very nature is static and fixed in time. Moreover, the space offers little interpretative context because traditional labels and other contextual material radically alter the aesthetic experience offered by the space. Glazer and her colleagues turned to digital media to overcome these limitations and experiment with new ways of curating online. Before coming to FSG, the Peacock Room had been installed in the home of Charles Lang Freer in Detroit, Michigan. Freer’s house is now part of the campus of Wayne State University (WSU), and the university was interested in re-envisioning the room as it existed when it was located in the Freer home. In 2010, FSG reinstalled the Peacock Room to its 1908 appearance and was thinking about new ways to interpret the space for visitors. WSU and FSG decided to partner and create a digital archive and web site, “The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact,” that would address both their aspirations. The WSU team of digital librarians and learning specialists provided the technical expertise for the project, and FSG developed the content and directed the project team. Glazer demonstrated the site’s many pathways for user engagement, such as panoramas of the room as it existed in London and Detroit, several highly curated narrative features, and the wide-ranging

14 In response to an audience question, Powell acknowledged that he did provide editorial oversight for the entries, just as he would for any curatorial project he oversees. However, he made few changes because the students “rose to the occasion,” following his suggestion that they write clearly and for a general audience. His main challenge as editor was to restrain himself from asserting his voice and ideas into their analyses. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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digital archive of materials. The web site lets users experience the room in ways that are not possible in the physical space. Users also can explore the stories, people, events, and places that shape the history of the room and its contents, and can create their own connections, leave comments, and tag materials. FSG welcomes user interaction on the site, and has used information from users to add or amend its own curatorial records. Studies of user analytics show that the site has a large international visitor base (China is the second largest user), which accords with FSG’s larger mission of making its collection more widely accessible. Building on the success of this project, Glazer’s colleague Maya Foo discussed the next iteration of the digital Peacock Room – a mobile app called “The Peacock Room Comes to America.” Published in June of 2013, this free app was created to enhance a visitor’s experience while inside the Peacock Room at FSG. It uses timelines to document the history of the room and allows users to more closely explore the pots, shutters, and mural that are its central elements. Users also can virtually add or remove pots from a sideboard, and send a postcard of their curated selection to others. Some visitors to the Peacock Room bring the app with them on their own mobile devices, but FSG also provides iPads for onsite use. Analyses conducted to date show that the app is used on FSG’s iPads for an average of 30 minutes per user, and docents report that the app helps them focus the attention of school groups more directly towards the particular works they are discussing. Although the app was developed to enhance the visitor experience, it is clear that non-visitors are using it as well. The number of downloads far exceed the number of onsite visits to the Peacock Room. The app and web site have distinctly different purposes and presentations. The app is more technologically advanced and has a polished user interface, but it is simpler and more restrictive than the web site. Its easy-to-use format offers a tightly constructed virtual experience that is “tethered to the room”. By contrast, the web site is more amenable to scholarship and user-driven interactions, letting users go beyond the material to create their own narratives and connections.15 The project team continues to explore ways to make the Peacock Room more accessible via digital technologies.16 Glazer concluded that each new step they take with digital technology gives them another way to share the dynamic history of the Peacock Room, expands their professional reach and audience, and generates more opportunities for users to become their partners in learning and scholarship.

Insights from the Q&A

The Different Meanings of Digital Curation

15 Copies of the FSG specifications list for both the project web site and app are available upon request. Readers should contact Maya Foo at the Freer Sackler Gallery for copies of this document. 16 One project on the horizon is a partnership with Google to develop a Peacock Room mobile tour using free authoring software. Per Lee Glazer, this project, part of the Google Cultural Institute (http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home), is still in development at Google. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Both Powell and Glazer/Foo referred to digital curation in ways that differ from the meaning employed in the library community, where it connotes a data preservation process. For content providers like museums, digital curation is a process of selecting, prioritizing, researching, analyzing, and arranging content within the unique confines of the digital environment. The different meanings of this term were initially a source of confusion for Glazer/Foo and their WSU partners. Glazer and her team agree that libraries are better positioned to “digitally curate” data in the preservation sense; indeed, WSU is hosting the Peacock Room web site because they have the capability to care for the data in this environment and FSG does not.

AFTERNOON SESSION 2: PUBLISHING ONLINE

Writing Searching A. Joan Saab Associate Professor of Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester

Joan Saab introduced a journey of discovery that led her to experiment with scholarly writing in the digital age. Saab is one of the founders of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, an association that arose from an earlier Scholarly Communications Institute on visual studies. A goal of the Alliance is to develop sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and media-rich scholarship. One of these platforms, Scalar, is “a free, open-source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online.”17

The Alliance partnered with technologists and university presses (at MIT, Duke, and the University of California) to develop Scalar. Saab highlighted the criticality of this partnership. If scholars are to publish with Scalar, they will need the imprimatur, placement, and services that scholarly presses offer. They also need the technologists to build the tools, but equally important, to point scholars and publishers to new ideas and possibilities in the digital arena.

Saab initially had no plans to use Scalar for her own work. She was interested in its development because it offered an opportunity to address the massive changes underway in scholarly publishing. She also was concerned about her graduate students, who would be negatively affected by the tumult of these changes, and wanted to help them explore new publishing paradigms. Things changed in 2008, when Saab participated in a NEH-sponsored summer institute in Los Angeles on broadening the digital humanities. That same summer, by sheer coincidence, there was a city-wide celebration of the work of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Saab has long been interested in Siqueiros’s Los Angeles mural América Tropical. Created in 1932, this mural was whitewashed soon after it was created because of the provocative nature of its content. Various efforts to conserve the mural have proved difficult, as Siqueiros used experimental

17 See Scalar Overview at http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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techniques that challenge restoration efforts. Nevertheless, the mural has taken on an iconic status in the community over time, fueled in part by a 1960s documentary about the work. Innumerable copies, homages, and other iterations of the work can be found around the Los Angeles region and beyond. Saab had been collecting information on this mural and its history as part of a long-term research project.

With the Los Angeles “Summer of Siqueiros,” Saab found herself awash in new Siqueiros material that increasingly “lived” in nontraditional media and platforms (such as Facebook). Her research materials now spanned eight decades and existed in innumerable formats. As she tried to organize this material, Saab found herself struggling to find a way to tell the Siqueiros story in a traditional narrative manner. Increasingly she began to think that Scalar’s platform would mesh well with her needs. Rather than force all this material research into one narrative, Scalar would let her create multiple narratives. She decided to go forward with Scalar, and the result is her “book,” Searching for Siqueiros, a multimedia, born-digital work on the history and legacy of David Siqueiros’ América Tropical mural.

Saab demonstrated this work in Scalar, showing how the platform lets authors create paths into the content and how users can jump in, out, and across paths in any way they wish. Saab created five distinct paths in her work (Introduction, Biography, Legacies, Searching for Siqueiros,18 and Writing History in the Digital Age19), with extensive tagging in each path. She demonstrated how Scalar can visually display relationships between tags, a feature she found useful because it revealed relationships between pages, places, individuals, and media that she had not previously identified.

As she concluded her presentation, Saab was forthright about fighting “scholarly anxiety” over the need to produce a conventional book. Scalar won out because it could accommodate her media-diverse materials and multiple stories in a way that a book could not. In the end, Saab decided to title her innovative work, “Searching for Siqueiros” because the title conveys the multiple journeys that underlie its production: her historical search to uncover América Tropical, her hunt for visual references to this work, and her quest to find a new form of scholarly practice that allows her presentation of materials and scholarship to be portrayed as richly as possible.

Two Digital Projects in American Landscape Design History Therese O’Malley Associate Dean at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art Therese O’Malley spoke of two digital projects that had their basis in the Keywords in American Landscape Design,20 a compendium that documents changes in landscape and garden terminology in America. The first project began after this book was published, when O’Malley and her colleagues

18 Saab described this path as a blog-like section that documents her own journey of discovery and research. 19 This path is what Saab terms the “scholarly backbone” of the work, incorporating citations, documentation, methodology and historiography. 20 O’Malley, Therese, with contributions by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Anne L. Helmreich. 2010. Keywords in American Landscape Design. Yale University Press, 736 pp. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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explored ways to make the book’s many unpublished resources available online. With the assistance of Emily Pugh, CASVA’s Robert H. Smith Digital Humanities Research Associate, they turned to MediaWiki, an open source wiki tool that enables rich cross-referencing of resources and extensive documentation of changes over time. O’Malley demonstrated the their use of MediaWiki by choosing a term (“alley”) as a point of entry, and highlighting the extensive linking of names, places, and images, as well as the zooming and citation building capabilities. She and her colleagues have input a significant amount of information in the resource, and will continue to add essays, images, and other content over time. Emphasis will be placed on creating entries for resources and entities that are not well known or easily found elsewhere on the web. The second project draws from Lewis Miller’s Guide to Central Park, a richly illustrated album that documents 19th century Central Park. Miller was an itinerant carpenter and his work has long been considered part of the American folklore oeuvre. His album contains watercolors of the Park’s central structures and includes text, poems and other commentary in both English and German. It seemed an ideal subject for the online journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which was experimenting with new approaches to digital scholarship and publication. O’Malley discussed how she and the editors struggled with matching the digital medium and the content. What form should it take? What should the “reading” experience be like? In the end, they decided to focus on Miller’s sources for his image and text rather than his movement through the Park. This decision led them to choose BookReader (an open source manuscript navigation tool developed by the Internet Archive) as their basic display platform. The project team added two additional features to this tool (“Transcription and Description” and “Notes and Sources”) so they could annotate the album pages. They also mapped Miller’s drawings of places in the Park to their contemporary locations using Viewshare, a tool for visualizing digital collections that uses interactive maps, timelines, charts, etc. As they conducted their research, the team was amazed at the breadth of Miller’s literary and visual knowledge. The album’s text and images are a miscellany of references pulling from sources as eclectic as Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and William Cullen Bryant, and from the panoply of pictorial sources found in the illustrated press that was emerging at this time. The project team linked much of the text and associated images with relevant materials from newspaper, library, and museum archives to embed Miller’s efforts both in the past and the present. They also considered Miller’s work in a broader scholarly context in two essays that discuss his attraction to Central Park (by O’Malley), and the theme of religious travelers in the Guide (by Kathryn R. Barush). The result, “In the Park”: Lewis Miller’s Chronicle of American Landscape at Mid-Century, shows Miller in a new light. The interactive scholarly article offers high-resolution images, links to resources that bring evidence to bear on the essays, and offers a “study of place” by mapping of past and present locations. The project melds traditional scholarship with digital tools to unveil Miller’s album anew, and to rethink Miller’s role in American folk art.

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Art History Online: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide’s Digital Research and Publishing Initiative Emily Pugh Webmaster, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and National Gallery of Art Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW) is an online, peer-reviewed art history journal. Begun in 2002, the journal received a Mellon Foundation grant in 2011 to support a digital publishing and research initiative called “Digital Humanities and Art History”. This initiative has two key goals: 1) to maximize the online publication format of NCAW and 2) to provide an incentive for authors to conduct research in the digital humanities. It manifests itself in a new journal feature – a digital humanities article – that co-exists with traditional articles within the journal. Emily Pugh, the project manager and publication developer for this initiative, outlined the challenges faced and the lessons learned as they developed the initiative. From the very beginning of the planning process, NCAW’s managing editors faced a dilemma. They wanted the authors and the scholarship to drive tool selection and use, but this approach made it impossible to generate a clear budget upfront because they did not know what hardware/software and technical services would be needed until they were deep into the process. To provide some structural guidance, the editors selected three areas they felt would benefit from new publishing and research tools: • Data mining and analysis (e.g., analysis of social networks among the community of dealers, critics,

art markets, etc.) • Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mapping (e.g., looking at change over time and space) • High-resolution imaging and dynamic image presentation (e.g., panoramas of high resolution

images to present large-scale, site-specific works). To date NCAW has published two articles under the Mellon initiative: the article presented by Therese O’Malley in her presentation (“In the Park”: Lewis Miller’s Chronicle of American Landscape at Mid-Century,) and Local/Global: Mapping the Nineteenth Century London Art Market (by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich). Each article uses toolsets suitable to their authors’ research objectives and datasets. Both include project narratives that detail the scholars’ experience and responsibilities in researching and producing the articles.21 One of the biggest lessons learned from this initiative is that the traditional publishing model - where research is completed and then handed over to the publisher - no longer holds firm. Outlining what she termed a classic “chicken/egg” problem in digital publications, Pugh discussed how the presentation format for these projects is necessary to conceptualize the content, but conceptualizing the content requires an idea of the appropriate presentation format. She characterized digital publishing as a synergistic process where generating new scholarship and publishing new scholarship

21 A third article – a re-creation of an 1827 Louvre exhibition that uses 3D photography taken in the Louvre galleries – is currently in development. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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must be conducted in tandem. Another lesson learned is that digital publishing projects are time-consuming. Often a new tool must be created along the way, or an existing tool must be modified for a publication format. These projects also require extensive project management, programmers who understand the needs of humanities scholarship, improved editing processes, and an appreciation for the different expectations, evaluation, and insights of interdisciplinary partners. There also are a host of unresolved questions relating to digital publishing projects. For example, when is something considered “published” in this environment? In the Local/Global article cited above, the map developed by author Pamela Fletcher will change as she continues with her research and adds more data to it. This ability to seamlessly update information is one of the hallmarks of digital publications, but at some point these articles must be “closed” so the information can be included (and consistently referred to) in scholarly discourse. Pugh also spoke about other unresolved questions, such as how users interact with these kinds of publications, who owns the publication content, how the publication workflow is affected, and how one addresses the unique issues that arise with the collaborative teams working on these publications. Pugh concluded by discussing the importance of the Mellon digital research and publishing initiative. Through its support, NCAW has developed a framework that “corresponds to art history, art historians and art historical scholarship.” The editors better understand what is required of scholars and publishers, are cultivating a pool of talented programmers to tap into, and are building a base of experienced art historians who can advise their colleagues on the digital publishing process. Pugh expressed her hope that NCAW’s experience and success will answer some of the questions scholars may have about what digital humanities can offer above and beyond traditional tools and methodologies of research.

Insights from the Q&A Digital Publications and Their Impact on Writing, Tenure and Costs Digital publications do affect the way scholars approach writing. O’Malley felt she needed to be more disciplined when writing in this environment because she could easily “go off in any direction.” She also was aware that writing for an online audience is very different than writing for the audiences who read academic books or journals. Saab also approached her writing differently, creating detailed paper-based mappings of her Scalar paths to ensure that wherever a user entered into her work, the writing would make sense and the user could find an easy entrée to other paths. All the panelists noted that their publications are professionally edited, so their different approaches do not affect the quality of the writing. Most of the panelists believe tenure committees are becoming more open-minded about digital publications, but feel that authors of these works must help them along. Indeed, one of the reasons American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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NCAW requires its authors to define “who did what” in their project narratives is to help tenure committees (and others) understand a candidate’s exact role in these projects. Saab recently learned that her Siqueiros publication would count in her promotion review, which gives her hope that things are changing. But she remains concerned about her graduate students’ prospects as they face the mounting crisis in scholarly publication. She believes tenured faculty should publish in the online environment so they can push the boundaries for their graduate students and for untenured faculty in the academic pipeline. A final discussion ensued over the tension between open (i.e., freely available) online publications and the high costs of producing these publications. Both Scalar and the NCAW digital publishing initiative are grant funded, which is not a sustainable business model in the long term. Saab discussed her publication’s university imprint, and wondered if university presses, in return for offering their imprints, might impose a pay wall on these publications to recover costs. Pugh attributed much of the costs to the current “handcrafted” nature of digital publications: each work has its own planning, development and implementation strategy, making the process expensive and time-intensive. Costs should come down as we develop models and tools that can be re-used.

FREQUENT THREADS AND THEMES

Many similar ideas surfaced from the presentations and Q&A discussions (and continued in the workshop that followed the symposium). These common themes are summarized below. Data is messy – deal with it Data sets rarely are pristine. They frequently were compiled in the past for purposes that are vastly different from intended uses today. Their content may be unverified. They often have gaps in coverage. These issues are the norm for humanities data. Humanities scholars live with these limitations, do their best to address them, and make them explicit in their scholarly reporting. The important point is to forge ahead, because messy data can be interesting data. It can intrigue researchers and prompt them to explore new pathways (as it did for Brady on the Warhol flowers project, Hulst on her Castelli research, and the dogged statistician on the Photogrammar team.) For those working on digital humanities projects, messy data is as revealing as it is daunting. It also can be enormously time-consuming. Humanities data sets require extensive preparation before they can be analyzed with digital tools. Sledge had to create extraction programs to pull data out of the Inventory of American Paintings database into a structure he could use for his analysis. Mazzone and Brady wrote programs that extracted data from the Warhol flower paintings and assigned data to these works in order to interpret them. Moravec had to “pre-process” her data

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numerous times as she proceeded with her analysis. In digital humanities projects, data preparation introduces entirely new workflows into the research process. Transparency is the new black When reporting on digital projects, scholars must be explicit about research assumptions, datasets, and research roles, as well as their tool selection and use. The level of transparency required is deeper than most scholars imagine, and is critical for accurate peer review and assessment by readers, publishers, and tenure and promotion committees. Pugh addressed transparency in the context of NCAW’s digital publishing initiative. The articles resulting from this initiative are a collaborative effort of many people doing different things, often with different tools. Their efforts cannot be assessed without a clear explanation of roles, processes, and methodologies. Hulst and Moravec addressed the transparency issue with tool use, noting that a tool’s settings can alter the visual portrayal of data, which is why scholars must be clear in defining their tool usage parameters. Tilton urged scholars to be transparent about the analysis process, even when it yields inconclusive results. Doing so may prompt another scholar to take a different approach and find a better way to use your data. Open source makes it possible The importance of open source tools is apparent by the number of speakers using them. The projects discussed by Pugh, Mazzone and Brady, Moravec, Hulst, O’Malley, Powell, Rogers, and Saab are built in whole or in part on open source tools. Moreover, there is tacit understanding that anyone who creates a new tool for a scholarly project has an obligation to release it as open source so others may benefit. Indeed, Wexler and Tilton announced that they would be following this practice with Photogrammar: they will be placing its source code in GitHub (itself an open source product) for use by others. Tools can help build or break (and this is good thing) The digital tools used to analyze humanities datasets can help a scholar ‘build’ an argument or ‘break’ it. Hulst’s use of digital tools helped her iteratively develop an argument for Castelli’s real (versus perceived) role in contemporary art. Conversely, Wexler and Tilton’s use of Photogrammar’s mapping tools showed that popular and scholarly notions of the imagery associated with the FSA collection were misaligned with reality. In Hulst’s case, tools revealed new patterns in her data, leading her to new insights. For Wexler and Tilton, tools shifted long-held scholarly assumptions about the FSA collections and their iconic role in portraying important events and eras in US history.

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“Not all those who wander are lost”22 Many speakers portrayed their research as a journey. For Hulst, a self-described “accidental digital art historian,” questions about gallerist Leo Castelli drew her to digital tools to analyze archival records. Having exceeded the capabilities of one tool she moved on to another, which led to new questions that required yet a different set of tools for analysis. Through a series of trials, errors, and pivots, she emerged with a richer and more precise understanding of Castelli’s role in the art world. Powell too outlined a journey of discovery, as he identified a way to get his students more deeply engaged with works of art directly and through the use of digital tools. Saab chronicled both the angst and adventure of writing a scholarly work on a digital platform in lieu of a conventional book. And Varner and Gogan spoke of identifying new pathways and connections as they explored Warhol’s work and influence in society via the Timeweb tool. Important lessons were drawn from these “journeys” about the nature of digital scholarship. First, experimentation and iteration are important components of digital projects, which results in a research process that often is nonlinear. Moreover, the use of digital tools and methodologies frequently leads to new or different research questions than the ones that were originally proposed. These lessons underscore the exploratory nature of digital projects. Wandering into unforeseen territory is what makes them so revelatory.

22 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings. 1954. UK: George Allen & Unwin. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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WORKSHOP

The half-day workshop that followed the symposium offered an opportunity to delve deeper into issues surrounding digital scholarship and to identify specific collaborative research agendas. Twenty-seven individuals participated in the workshop (see Appendix A), which took place at the Archive of American Art’s offices in Washington, DC. A summary of their efforts is outlined below. (The workshop structure is outlined in Appendix B.)

Collaborations and Projects Drawing from ideas that emerged during the symposium and from their own research interests, participants identified over 20 topics23 they wished to consider further during the workshop. To bring this large number of disparate topics to a manageable few, the group categorized the topics into four subject areas (data; tools; research lifecycle; and access and pedagogy) and formed working groups for each subject. Participants joined one of these four groups and took part in two sets of discussions within their group. The first discussion was an opportunity to identify mutual interests; the second was an opportunity to sow the seeds of a future collaboration. The discussions of the Data Working Group focused on the importance of sharing art historical collections data. The group suggested two projects that would address this issue in broad and specific contexts:

1. Developing a pilot application programming interface (API) with a limited data set, and releasing it into the “wild” to see how it is used. This project would offer participants a hands-on experience on API development, collections datasets, and audience use. Two workshop participants offered to discuss this idea with their institution’s archives department, perhaps using oral histories or a subset collection for the Archives of American Art as “starter” dataset.

2. Developing a policy and handbook/guide or white paper that helps smaller institutions take steps toward releasing their collections as linked open data (LOD). The handbook might address this topic using a phased, step-by-step approach that doesn’t overwhelm the resources of a small institution.

The Tools Working Group identified the need for an art historical toolkit that offered or suggested appropriate tools for different types of analyses and methodologies. The group started developing this idea during the workshop, compiling lists of tools they have used or knew to be useful for network analysis, text analysis, historical visualization, spatial analysis, and image analysis, recognition and organization. Hilary Culbertson of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology

23 Examples: Digital tools in the classroom; geo-referencing/mapping; data mining and oral history; collaborative processes; historical erasure and gaps in preservation; training; research methods; linked open data; metadata; digital divide/differential access; digitization workflows. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Alliance (HASTAC) offered the services of her organization to create an art history group on the HASTAC site where the document could be hosted, promoted, and amended by a larger scholarly community. As a result, a nascent art historical toolbox (“The Box”) 24 is now available online. Scholars, researchers, and other interested individuals are invited to contribute to the document by adding information about new or preferred tools, personal experiences with various tools, links to projects that use different tools, etc. There also is an open invitation to art historians to join the newly created HASTAC art history group and share information, postings, and other news about digital scholarship and pedagogy that might be of interest to those in the profession.25 The Research Methodologies Working Group discussed the need for a statement of best practices in research methodologies. As art historians increasingly conduct digital scholarship, guidance is needed on training, interdisciplinary collaboration, defining methods, workflows, and audiences, and integrating scholarship in ways that make it more visible. The best practices statement also would serve as an advocacy document, helping promote digital scholarship in art history among the broader reaches of the academy and scholarly community. The working group felt the best way to move forward on developing this statement was through personal efforts, i.e, having individuals in the group “stir the pot” and bring this need to the attention of their university administrators, professional organizations (CAA for example), grant agencies and publishers. The Access and Pedagogy Working Group discussed the increasing difficulty of getting access to the vast amounts of information now available to us. They proposed a “knowledge hub” that would aggregate information on projects and products in a spatial way, clustering things visually so people could be more easily directed to projects or platforms that might be useful to them in their own scholarly endeavors.

Other Resources The last few minutes of the workshop were offered as an open forum to give participants an opportunity to share information about local or regional events and opportunities that are of interest the group. Hilary Culbertson introduced HASTAC, an alliance of 12,000 humanists, artists, social scientist and technologists. HASTAC offers its members an online community for sharing share news, tools, projects, and research in an expansive and interdisciplinary way. It is embarking on a new initiative, Shaping the Future of Higher Education, which will examine how to transform higher education for the 21st century. She urged anyone with an interest in pedagogy to join this initiative. She also discussed the HASTAC Scholars Program, whose goal is to build a community of students who can work at “the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities, and sciences.” Kelly Quinn of the Archives of American Art discussed the Archives blog and its internship program for students of American art. The Archives welcomes guest posts on the blog that address use of the

24 See: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uEc0SjjNpSpnjIXvdoshXis5yh5rG_7BdfnCl6BEgO0/edit 25 See http://www.hastac.org/groups/art-history for information on the group, how to join, and current comments and postings. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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Archives’ collections for research or teaching, but they also would consider posts that discuss a research idea or bring attention to exceptional student papers. And more recently, the Archives is participating in the Smithsonian’s Transcription Center, an institution-wide effort at crowdsourcing the transcription of documents and materials in the Smithsonian’s collections. They have posted diaries and letters online for transcription, and Quinn discussed the pedagogical possibilities of using this resource, particularly for teaching students how to read primary resources and put them into a larger context. Marcella Florence of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture discussed internships at her institution, including ones devoted to cataloging and metadata and curatorial work,26 and encouraged participants to bring these to the attention of their students. Finally, Jeremy Rowe of the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University announced that the Daguerreian Society, an organization that advances scholarship about the art, history and practice of early photographic processes, is offering two publication awards for papers that advance this field. He encouraged anyone with interests in early photographic history and digital scholarship to submit a paper for consideration. A number of seminars, workshops and events focusing on art history and digital tools/research are on the horizon in 2014. These events, and other related items of interest referenced during the symposium, are listed in Appendix C. Finally, various individuals mentioned associations of digital humanities centers as valuable resources for collaborative opportunities. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is a community-based advisory group that promotes digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines. centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers that works collaboratively to support digital humanities endeavors. In the publishing arena, Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) “an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web”27 was cited as an important, timely resource on digital humanities news and opportunities.

26 See “Internships at NMAAHC” at http://nmaahc.si.edu/GetInvolved/Internships. 27 See Digital Humanities Now at http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/about/. American Art History and Digital Scholarship – Summary Report page Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art

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APPENDIX A: WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS

Sarah Archino Postdoctoral Fellow, Terra Foundation/Institut national d'histoire de l'art Andrianna Campbell Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Center, City University of New York Hilary Culbertson Program Coordinator, HASTAC Samantha Deutch Assistant Director, Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Library Marcella F. Florence Digital Engagement Manager, Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture Bill Duncan Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and author of forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Yves Tanguy Marie Gaspar-Hulvat Assistant Professor, School of Art, Kent State University Lee Glazer Associate Curator of American Art, Smithsonian Freer-Sackler Gallery Kate Haw Director, Archives of American Art Molly Hardy Digital Humanities Curator, American Antiquarian Society Titia Hulst Ph.D. Candidate, New York University Institute of Fine Arts Katherine Jentleson Ph.D. Student, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University Liza Kirwin Deputy Director, Archives of American Art

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Jessica Marten Curator, Rochester Memorial Art Gallery Abigail McEwen Assistant Professor, Department of Art History & Archaeology, University of Maryland Blyth McManus M.A. Candidate, Art History, George Mason University Dan Moore Librarian and Digital Humanist, Hampton Roads, Virginia Michelle Moravec Associate Professor of History, Rosemont College Jacqueline Musacchio Professor of Art, Wellesley College Kelly Quinn Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives, Archives of American Art Francesca Rose Program Director, Publications and Manager of Communications - Europe, Terra Foundation Louisa Ruby Head, Photo Archive Research, Frick Library Jeremy Rowe Executive Associate Director, School of Computing and Informatics, Arizona State University Mary Savig Curator of Manuscripts, Archives of American Art A. Joan Saab Associate Professor of Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester Emily Shapiro Executive Editor, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum Jennifer SnyderOral History Archivist, Archives of American Art Jason Stieber

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Collections Specialist, Archives of American Art Lauren Tilton Ph.D. Student, American Studies and Co-Director, Photogrammar, Yale University Laura Wexler Professor, American Studies and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Co-Director, Photogrammar, Yale University Diane Zorich Cultural Heritage Consultant

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APPENDIX B: WORKSHOP STRUCTURE Opening remarks by Kate Haw, Director of the Archives of American Art (10 minutes) Participant Introductions: (25 minutes) Explanation of workshop goals and structure – Diane Zorich, workshop leader (10 minutes) Identifying topical breakout groups (3 to 5 groups in total) (20 minutes) Group Discussion #1: Identifying Interests (25 minutes)

Group charge: • Identify the group’s common interests in American art history and digital scholarship • Identify ways the group might pursue these interests collaboratively

Prompts:

• Why is this area/methodology of interest to you? o Are you doing research in this area now? o What potential do you see for this area/methodology in art history scholarship,

pedagogy, etc.? o What areas of research would you like to explore in this area/with this methodology?

Any specific ideas/projects you’ve wanted to pursue? • Which of the ideas/research areas are of interest to others in the group and might be

worth pursuing in a collaborative fashion? Groups report out (25 minutes total) Group Discussion #2: Pursuing Opportunities (25 minutes)

Group Charge: • Identify how you might take the group’s top ideas forward (moving from brainstorming to

preliminary planning); outline a roadmap forward. Prompts:

• How should we proceed? (e.g., initial planning / implementation) i. Consider who you need to work with (other partners):

1. In technology arena (DH center, your institution’s IT?, others?...) 2. Other institutional departments, repositories (archives/libraries/museums who

might have content or expertise)? 3. Other colleagues working in the intersections or peripheries of your interests

(colleagues in other areas, disciplines, fields….)

ii. Think about structural ways to proceed

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1. What is a logical way to proceed? (E.g., working group, individual deputized to conduct preliminary follow-up?)

2. What is a reasonable working plan within this structure (e.g., develop proposal, organize planning meeting, set up a project wiki, communicate over a project list, etc.)

3. If more investigation is needed, who will lead this effort? a. What additional areas need to be investigated? b. Who are some individuals/institutions to contact during this investigation (i.e.,

“leads” or models to look at) 4. Timeframes 5. Individuals who will take the lead at each of these stages of planning

Groups report out: (25 minutes) Brief summary, next steps, and thanks to group – Diane Zorich (10 minutes) Open Forum: an opportunity for participants to discuss events at their local institutions/regions that might be of interest to the group (20 minutes)

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APPENDIX C: EVENTS AND RESOURCES IN DIGITAL ART HISTORY The following ongoing and upcoming events and resources in digital art were mentioned during the symposium and workshop.

Digital Humanities Summer Institutes, Workshops, Camps for Art Historians THATCamp CAA The Humanities and Technology Camp pre-conference forum on digital art history, to be held at the annual conference of the College Art Association, February 10-11, 2014. “Beyond the Digital Slide Library” - UCLA Summer Institute on Digital Humanities and Art History An eight-day, Getty Foundation funded institute to provide training, instruction and context for a limited number of art historians. Full information on this Institute was not yet available at the time of this report. “Digital Humanities for Art Historians” - Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Digital Humanities Summer Institute for Art Historians A Getty Foundation funded project to support training workshops in digital art history. Applications will be available in early 2014. Interested individuals can be notified when the call for applications goes out by registering at http://chnm.gmu.edu/digital-humanities-for-art-historians-getty-foundation-2014-summer-institute/. Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History at Middlebury College, August 3-15, 2014. Information and application can be found at: http://www.kressfoundation.org/news/Article.aspx?id=35544&blogid=132

Art History Publications Showcasing Digital Scholarship Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide (Mellon initiative, Digital Scholarship and Art History)

Panorama A new online journal from the Association of Historians of American Art that will launch in the Fall of 2014.

Essay Prizes for Exemplary Online Scholarly Research and Presentation

ARIAH Prize for Online Publishing The Association of Research Institutes in Art History prize to encourage and promote high scholarly standards in online publishing in all fields of art history.

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Archives of American Art Graduate Research Essay A prize for compelling original research using the resources of the Archives of American Art as primary evidence.

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