Digital Art History

Thematic issue of the magazine Život umjetnosti 99-2016 on the topic of digital art history is now available, bringing together articles of 12 authors.

„The taxonomy of “digital” art history entails, as stated by Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, “digital discourses and narratives created by museums and other memory organizations and published on the Web; studies that use digital resources without which they could not have been conducted; new ways of curating online exhibitions based on the possibilities offered by hyperlinks, multimedia, transmedia, and Web design; and a ‘radical’ form of digital art history that implies a dramatic epistemological, theoretical, and interpretive transformation.” We should add that most of the mentioned practices, especially the “radical” ones, which we would rather define as methodological and research oriented, imply innovative and creative use of information technology and new media technology, as well as the adoption of a pronouncedly interdisciplinary approach which entails quantitative methods of analysis, data mining and modelling, and methods and techniques of data and network visualizations, whose applications provide scientific insights beyond the reach of the analytical apparatus of traditional art history. In addition to the close collaboration between researches from the fields of humanities, information sciences, social and natural sciences, the success of such research is highly dependent on: the willingness of art historians to adopt different working methods (team and collective work), the ability to cooperate with experts outside the academic circles, the acceptance of unorthodox “non-scientific” ways of communicating and sharing knowledge (blogs, virtual social networks) and, above all, the capacity of posing new and different research questions based on the analytical capabilities of contemporary media technologies, to develop new interpretative strategies and produce new, interdisciplinary narratives.“

Ljiljana Kolešnik (from introduction to thematic issue)

For more information on the issue visit the magazine website: zivotumjetnosti.ipu.hr.

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Contact: zivot-umjetnosti / ipu.hr