“Digital Humanities and the Future of Art History” Session, which will present In-Person at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference, (New York / February 15–18, 2023)
Sponsored by the Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, August 31
Increasingly, humanists across disciplines are driving digital humanities projects. At the same time, data and digital visualizations have emerged as effective and efficient modes of developing and communicating information within and across myriad fields and sectors, within and without the academy and in various industries. Art historians and visual arts professionals have crucial knowledge about how representational choices inflect and communicate meaning, including within those projects that incorporate such visualizations, and yet they are infrequently involved in such initiatives. How might art historians leverage our training and abilities to think critically about visual literacy, histories of representation, data visualization, digital humanities, and the visual production of knowledge, and to more frequently enter into these enterprises and dialogues? Among other important attributes, might digital humanities and data visualization projects being developed in industries as diverse as medicine, video game design, and computer science constitute key pathways for professional practice for undergraduate majors and graduate students? And might visual arts professionals bring critical thinking about visuality’s entanglement with culture to such projects so as to more meaningfully attend to questions around equity and social justice?
The Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee seeks papers or projects exploring the possibilities afforded by the intersection of art history and digital and data-driven projects, especially as they might shape thinking about the field and its professional praxes.
Please send a 300-word abstract and short cv to Heather Belnap (heather_belnap@byu.edu) by August 31. For questions regarding participation in the 2023 CAA conference, visit their FAQ page.