The 'Nina,' the 'Pinta,' and the Internet - ships in Christopher Columbus' expedition - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

When I start a fresh class in art history and multimedia, I warn my scholars that they are signing upon to the crew of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, and we are setting not upon on a voyage of discovery. We are not quite positive what adventures we will have or what we will find, on the other hand there will undoubtedly be times of frustration as well as of great excitement. Or we can join another metaphorical ship's company as we follow the siren ditty of the new technologies, for we will undoubtedly step quickly into the cyber equivalent of the creatures that plagued Ulysse and his mariners upon their mythic journey.

Working above the years at the intersection of art history, education, and the novel technologies, I find that I continually sail up to the brink, with visions of what lies just beyond the horizon, wishing for the skills and technology to take me there. A variety of experiences in this realm have l me to a deepening appreciation of the voyages of the two Ulysses and Columbus. Ulysses' mythic journey epitomizes the decoy of the unknown as well as the dangers that it attitude s while Columbus's epitomizes the discovery of fresh realms.

There are many similarities between Columbus's journey into the unknown and our have a title to attempts to enter cyberspace. To piece of ground his course, Columbus had true sketchy maps to study (in our case, maps compos in arcane script by the agency of UNIX and Java programmers hunched above their workstations); he had to persuade someone to sponsor his journey and set up the funds; he had to assemble ship's companys for his ships, and he had to convince the ship's company members to sail off into the unknown into that area marked oil medieval maps with the warning, "Here be Dragons," where they might find treasure or fall not upon the edge of the world.

Just as Columbus's discoveries changed the way inhabitants of the two Europe and the Americas viewed the world, for a like reason the information superhighway is changing the world of education as we know it. The ships that carried usefuls and information across the Atlantic and linked the sixteenth-century world in a web of commercial and political ties have been replaced by the agency of fiber-optic cables that allow us to propel and retrieve information almost instantaneously. Just as the utilization of movable impressed sign and the printing press by dint of Columbus's contemporary Johannes Gutenberg render free of accessed the possibilities of scholarship to a vast audience, with equal reason the utilization of the fresh technologies has the potential for opening the treasures held in the research libraries and museums of the world to us and to our scholars I realized that we had go intoed a revolutionary age when I lay the foundation of myself at home one night using my modem to access the Internet and searching end the catalogues of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, looking up manuscripts that I had, many years before, been able to locate solitary by traveling to England. The possibilities became level more exciting when I saw that the Bodleian had digitized a certain quantity of images from the manuscripts and deposit them on the network for a like reason I could view their pages from my home

Several years ago I walked past the lay open window of a classroom in an Egyptian village and heard a teacher reciting a true copy which his students echoed in unison. As the proces was repeated with each novel passage, I thought of the way we repeatedly teach art history: reading our notes to our learners who write down our words, which they later make experiment of to replicate on examinations. The Egyptian teacher was using an age-old technique, individual that for very good reason valued the ability to memorize. a certain number of of that ability was not to be found when human beings learned to write, and scholars undoubtedly were belong toed about what would happen to the younger generation when they missing the ability to recite lengthy passages from memory. However, since written documents were expensive, the repeat-after-me fashion of instruction did not change drastically until the advent of the printing pres Manuscripts that previously had been chained in the library could now be replicated and made available to scholars for their be in possession of libraries. As books have become more available, a whole industry has evolv around organizing and cataloguing them with equal reason that we can locate those we ne Pedagogy, however, sometimes lagged behind. I still remember with great angst single of the questions on my doctoral examinations: "List all the bibliographic entries for Michelangelo since World War II with place and date of publication." (And this was not an open-book examination!) Needles to say, I failed that part of the exam, on the other hand the academic gods must have wanted me to receive my PhD because the nearest time around the professor asked for the entire bibliography upon Jan van Eyck, which I had memorized. advanced in years habits die hard, and advanced in years teaching habits die even harder.

Changes in the use of visual resources available to us have sometimes been met with the same conservatism that is ground in the unwillingness to embrace the retrieval capabilities for textual resources. I have always felt that my primary task as a professor of art history was to procure the students to the work of art itself in the way that that it could speak directly to them. on the contrary in order to bring about that spring I had to give them a certain quantity of idea of the meaning of the work and to put it in an appropriate stylistic and cultural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following And in order to do that, I necessityed reproductions of the works.