Digital Art History – Issues, Challenges, Perspectives

The history of Art History is closely connected with the history of the reproduction of its research objects. In the early modern period they were spread by means of printed reproduction. For arthistorical research the invention of photography meant a big benefit concerning the increase and the accessibility of the material. But it was not until the transferring of the images into the digital form that a location-independent virtualisation in the internet was enabled as well as the application of computer-based methods both for quantitative and qualitative analysis. These developments still rise new challenges for the image-based disciplines but also offer many opportunities. Meanwhile, the term „digital art history“ has been established for the application of digital technologies and methods for arthistorical research and studies. The lecture will give an overview of the working fields and research areas, which go from management of data and knowlegde and its crosslinking, automatical image-analysis (pattern recognition), social media, crowd sourcing, gamification to visualisation, reconstruction and reception research. The presentation will focus on projects and developments within these fields and will discuss challenges and perspectives of computer-based research and studies in art history.