Re-viewing Digital Technologies and Art History, special issue of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy

Issue Editors
Kimon Keramidas, New York University and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Ellen Prokop, The Frick Art Reference Library

By raising awareness of the importance of integrating technology into intellectual work, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) promotes fluency in computational tools and analytical techniques and enhances our understanding of the role that new technologies play across different disciplines. This special issue focuses on digital art history (DAH), an emerging subfield of art history that considers how new technological tools have led to new strategies in teaching, research, conservation, and curation.

Interest in digital tools among art historians is uneven: while many have eagerly adopted new technologies and applied them to their research and teaching, others have been less willing to experiment with new methodologies and pedagogical practices. In an era of collaborative platforms and flipped classrooms, the PowerPoint lecture still holds sway. Surprisingly, for a professional field increasingly reliant on digital outreach and complex technological analysis, training and professional development often remains focused on survey-style classes and traditional curatorial practice. This issue aims to engage with these questions from a wide range of positions that explore how the digital has impacted the practice of art history as well as examine how DAH can improve current understanding of our shared visual and material culture.

We welcome submissions from authors across the academic spectrum, both within traditional art history departments and without, as well as curators, conservators, educators, and other art professionals. As always JITP encourages submissions in non-traditional publication formats. For this issue in particular we encourage innovative submissions that highlight the question of visuality and the digital. Possible topics include:

• fundamental shifts in the understanding of visual and material culture through the digital lens
• teaching visual culture literacy in K-12 curricula
• DAH in cultural heritage vs. the academy
• the impact of DAH on traditional art history curricula and career paths
• big data projects, data visualization, and digital scholarship in the study of visual culture

All work appearing in the Issues section of JITP is reviewed by the issue editors and independently by two scholars in the field, who provide formative feedback to the author(s) during the review process. We practice signed, as opposed to blind, peer review. We intend that the journal itself—both in our process and in our digital product—serve as an opportunity to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practices. Additionally, all submissions will be considered for our “Behind the Seams” feature, in which we publish dynamic representations of the revision and editorial processes, including reflections from the authorial and editorial participants.