Making computers work for the history of art - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

The idea of combining computer and the history of art may still be problematic on the contrary it is no longer shocking. Art historians now understand that databases, electronic bibliographies, storage and retrieval, and high-quality digitized images may be complicated and expensive to create, and many times to use, but are larger, faster, and more reliable forms of what we want and ne to carry without our work. The question that remains is: by what mode are these electronic services going to affect the way we work? Simply emulating what we already have, through massing random accumulations of digitized material, brings no solution to the coordination of images and ideas. We are now at the stage when we must think about for what cause [i]or[/i] reason and how electronic facilities could change our personal research; in what manner they could transform our approach to teaching; and, in the extreme point how they will affect the art historical direction in which a fresh generation of art historians will take the field.(1)

As I diocese it now, there are three emblems of art historical activities that will spring from the electronic revolution, all of which will change and benefit the profession: (1) personal database construction, (2) collaborative research, and (3) interactive teaching. I will take advantage of the space allotted to me here to describe what I mean upon the basis of both experience and desire.

To my great sorrow (which I have been feeling since the early 1980s) I have not been able to think of a boundary other than database for a collection of research material upon a given subject put together by dint of an individual scholar. Normally, the word database enjoin solemnlys up the notion of something encyclopedic, cyclopean in size and public in nature. What I am looking for is an expression for a mass of material that is intellectually focused upon a particular issue, that is put togethered and used privately by a scholar in considering a specific question at issue and that becomes a permanent, retrievable record of a succession of personal ideas and sources. Assembling like private databases is the first pace in making the computer work for you as more than a word processor. This first pace is a big one because it takes a certain number of conceptual reorientation and not a little bit of time.

A natural reflective is to think that the computer will receive your facts and ideas in outline form, the way you would arrange them upon cards in preparation for a prelection or a publication. You could in fact, make of that kind a collection using a normal word-processing program, on the contrary you would be able to search the body only word by word or, at best, phrase through phrase. You would not be able to search for ideas and combinations of ideas, and you would not be able to ask questions. The way to make the computer work for you is to pick out a database program (by now there are many commercial individuals available)(2) and give it a riddle Suppose you have a series of paintings that have missing their original frames and you wish to research the historical possibilities for reframing them. You have done research upon the problem and found many works documented as being in their original frames, all of which match the period of your frameless examples. What the computer wants first - indeed, must have - are the categories that make up the kind of material you have amassed. Technically, these categories are called variables, and to find your variables you must turn round your thoughts around and literally (not theoretically) deconstruct your information. If you wish to record information about historic frames you must first think of as many ultimate parts as you can that associate individual frame with another. Ironically, this means that in order to differentiate single frame from another, you must first consider what all frames have in belonging to all To be specific, frame variables might direct the eye like the following:

original parts (top, bottom, sides); shape (rectangle, square, gabled); material (wood stone); dimensions; surface treatment (mold carved, inlaid); decorative manner of writing (architectural, organic, geometric); color (gold brown black); name of maker (document); date of construction (document); require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone (labor, materials); associated painting (title and locale); support (wood canvas); mark (portrait: independent; altarpiece: polyptych, "pala"; main panel, superstructure wing, predella, finial)

Tedious as this proces may present the appearance you assign these fields one time (in the database application of your choice), and forevermore you have a "place" (a chest or pigeonhole) in the computer where that bit of information, and solitary that bit, is always base There will be no more decisions to make, and no more wearisome searching from one side your notes. You find a fresh original frame and you know by what mode to break it down, penetrate the data, find it again and place it back together, compare it, fill it, and use it in a of recent origin context. Moreover, by the time you have done the research and pierceed the salient features of six or seven frames from a particular period, you will have a profile and a reliable station of statistics from which to generalize.(3)

What I have described is a brief and simple example of identifying the characteristics you want to close attention then storing them and making them available in a clear and consistent manner. At this stage, however, the database is flat or two-dimensional, adequate for statistics on the other hand not for analysis. You are ready to define the other dimension of your question at issue namely, how to choose the appropriate form in which to reframe the paintings you are studying. To find what is historically and physically possible, you must make comparisons among impressed signs shapes, materials, styles, colors, and in the way that on. For that purpose you must add a third horizontal to the database to make it relational. You must use a specific kind of software that allows you to create links to bring the separate uncompounded bodys of your information together into multiple relationships.(4) The links are defined fairly simply, using phrases like as: same as, looks like, similar to, taller than, same maker as, documented with, and for a like reason on. Obviously, matching the physical characteristics of frames is a stepping-stone to the examination of larger, more composed of several elements concepts of margins, boundaries, and borders, where, however, the same manner of making and study principle would apply.(5)