Corinne Welger

Art history and the critical analysis of digital corpora

Digital Art History : does such a thing exist ? We intend to approach this question through the study of various digital corpora, produced in different fields of art history, such as image databases, digital catalogues, scholarly critical editions, etc.  

This workshop does not intend to propose technical training in the use of dedicated tools or encoding languages. Its purpose is to foster a collaborative reflection, based on the critical analysis of some very significant online corpora.

Some of the themes guiding our thinking process will be: the remediation of patterns of print or photographic culture into the digital environment; relationships between texts and images; visualisation tools, etc.

You can find below a sample of the digital corpora, which will be studied throughout this workshop:

• Monet’s Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago ; Online Picasso Project ;
• Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett ; Raphael Research Resource ; Cranach Digital Archive
• Van Gogh The Letters ; Ara Pacis Augustae...

Being, more often than not, the result of partnerships between museum professionals and academics, these digital resources revisit the traditional model of scientific publication.