Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) Conference 2024: ‘Britain and the Low Countries: Cultural Exchange Past, Present & Future’ (London and Cambridge, July 10-13, 2024)
Session Call for Papers, “Embracing the Digital Age: New Prospects for Researching Northern European Art with Computational Methods”
Submission Deadline: September 29, 2023
Over the last two decades, cultural institutions, collaborations, and individuals have increasingly relied on digital technologies to enhance the ways they engage and interrogate historical textual, material, and visual evidence. Recent advancements in data science, coupled with the ubiquity of high-speed computing, enables researchers to harness complex and computationally expensive algorithms that were previously unattainable and apply them to specific art historical research questions. This session seeks proposals from individuals and collaborations that utilize cutting-edge computational methods and/or technical tools to deepen our understanding of art and culture in the Low Countries and Britain in the early modern period. How do digital approaches enhance our understanding of the creation, sale, and collection of fine arts and material culture? How can computational methods help scholars overcome long-standing biases to uncover new evidence revealing the agency of historically marginalized individuals and groups? What novel technical tools can be leveraged to better preserve and study historical objects?
We invite proposals from individuals and collaborations that use digital approaches to address issues including, but not limited to: gender and sexuality; cross-cultural exchange; colonialism; the datafication of artworks; the annotation of interpretation; issues of class and accessibility to resources; and the conservation and preservation of historical objects. We welcome proposals from disciplines outside art history, as well as papers that take a transcultural approach and focus on under-researched media.
Proposals should consist of a title and an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short CV (one page). Please send your proposal by Friday September 29th to Lauryn Smith, lsmith@thefrickpittsburgh.org, and Weixuan Li, w.li@hum.leidenuniv.nl. All speakers are expected to be members of HNA by the time of the conference.