Calls for Papers/Jun 01, 2017

Visual Resources Special Issue: Digital Art History- Where Are We Now?

Visual Resources Special Issue: Digital Art History- Where Are We Now? lead image

In 2013, Visual Resources published a special issue devoted to Digital Art History. We recognize that since that date considerable activity has taken place in this area, which was then still in a phase of relative infancy. We feel that now is an opportune moment to assess what has been accomplished in the last half decade. To do so, we invite papers for another special issue dedicated to Digital Art History, to be published in 2018.

We seek papers that address key issues highlighted in Johanna Drucker's contribution to the 2013 special issue: "Is There a 'Digital' Art History?" Here, Drucker observed that art history had been slow to adopt the methods and tools of digital humanities and computational analysis. We therefore seek papers that demonstrate model projects applying such approaches to significant art-historical problems. These approaches may include text analysis, image analysis, geospatial analysis, and network analysis. In addition, recognizing that our discipline does have a history of creating online research resources composed of large datasets such as the Getty Provenance Index databases and the Getty vocabularies, as well as image libraries like Artstor and Bridgeman, we also seek papers that reveal innovative approaches to the development of this type of resource. Lastly, we invite papers that explore how new modes of online publication can advance art-historical scholarship and have a significant effect on the dissemination of knowledge. Papers should not only illuminate projects and processes, but also share insights from lessons learned and mistakes made- that is, we hope that contributors to this issue will share practical perspectives acquired in the process of developing and implementing projects in digital art history.