Appel à contribution : « Digital Mapping and Art History » (Middlebury, Vermont)

Digital Mapping and Art History (Middlebury, 3-15 Aug 14)

Middlebury, Vermont, August 3 - 15, 2014
Deadline: Mar 3, 2014

Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History
Call for Applicants

Middlebury College, Middlebury VT 
August 3-15, 2014

Middlebury College is pleased to invite applications for Fellows to 
participate in the first Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art 
History (August 3-15, 2014), generously sponsored by the Samuel H. 
Kress Foundation. Co-directed by Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University) and 
Anne Kelly Knowles (Middlebury College), the Summer Institute will 
emphasize how digital mapping of art historical evidence can open up 
new veins of research in art history as a whole. All art historians of 
any rank (including graduate students, curators, or independent 
scholars) with a scholarly problem related to spatial evidence or 
questions are encouraged to apply.

Whether talking about the spreading influence of Rembrandt’s workshop, 
Haussmann’s Plan of Paris, the Roman Forum, the caves of Dunhuang, the 
views of Edo, the market for Impressionist painting, the looting of 
assets by Napoleon, the movement of craftsmen over the medieval 
pilgrimage road, or the current proliferation of art expos globally, 
art history is peppered with spaces, both real and imagined. As such, 
spatial questions are central to many art historical problems, and 
visualizing spatial questions of different physical and temporal scales 
is an intellectual and technical problem amenable to the digital 
environment. Building the capacity to think spatially in geographic 
terms will carry an art historian a long way towards developing 
sophisticated questions and answers by exploiting the digital 
environment.

At the end of the two-week period, Fellows will have a grounding in the 
intellectual and historiographic issues central to digital humanities, 
basic understanding of the conceptual nature of data and the use of a 
database, an exposure to important examples of digital art history in 
the field, and a more in-depth study of one particular digital approach 
(GIS and the visualization of space). Graduating Fellows will have the 
vocabulary and intellectual foundation to participate in on-going 
digital humanities debates or other specialized digital humanities 
workshops while also gaining important practical and conceptual 
knowledge in mapping that they can begin to apply to as scholars and 
teachers.

Given this focus, our Institute will be ideal for those art historians 
who already have identified a spatial problem in their work. Note, 
though, that no prior knowledge or experience in digital humanities 
will be necessary or assumed for the application process. Naturally, 
general  awareness of the scholarly potential of the digital 
environment or mapping will be a plus. All geographies, time periods, 
and subareas of art history will be considered. 

For more information on the application process, see:  
http://las.depaul.edu/haa/docs/fulltime/Digital_Mapping_flyer.pdf

For questions, please contact at any time the co-directors
Paul B. Jaskot, pjaskot@depaul.edu; Anne Kelly Knowles, 
aknowles@middlebury.edu

All materials must be sent electronically by March 3, 2014.