briefingpaper: What's in the Art Historian's Tool Kit?

This paper explores how art historians' research and analysis may benefit from the use of technology-led solutions pursued by colleagues in other fields.

This paper was given in a modified form by Neil Grindley at the Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (3-6 September 2006) conference held at Dartington College of Arts, Devon.

It is clear that there is a widespread and majority reluctance across most areas of the arts and humanities to engage with any technology that might be considered more advanced or applied than the 'usual' desktop productivity tools; a view reflected by a recent report from the proceedings of the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities held at the University of Virginia in 2005. Whilst it is important therefore not to brand the art history scholarly community as being especially benighted in its dealings with technology, it should also be noted that they deal with a particularly rich, diverse and highly visual body of material as the focus of their research and analysis. Presently, the technological response to the complex questions that arise from the study of that material is - for the most part - fragmentary, inadequate and poorly coordinated.

To address this problem, art historians may benefit from looking outside of their discipline to learn from colleagues pursuing technology-led solutions in other fields. The Methods Network has a remit to support and fund this kind of interdisciplinary forum and has done so with a series of events and activities that has brought together researchers from diverse fields with the aim of defining shared challenges and collaborative solutions. The tools and methods referred to in this paper are a distillation of some of the techniques that have been presented or referred to in the course of that programme and the intention is to consider how they might be applicable, relevant and useful to art historians carrying out research.

http://methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/pdf/wkp01.pdf

This paper is one of nine working papers written for the AHRC ICT Methods Network. The Methods Network Working Papers form part of the range of information and support materials that have been assembled to assist arts and humanities researchers with the task of acquiring knowledge about ICT tools and methods. The papers focus on various different disciplines but also highlight where tools and methods can be of benefit to multiple subject areas.

It is anticipated that these documents may serve a number of non-exclusive functions:

• To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentary;
• As reference documents that foreground links and references to other material;
• As an introductory resource for researchers who are new to digital developments in a particular subject area;
• As a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organisation and community-building activities.