Digital Art History 101

I collaboratively developed an online textbook entitled Digital Art History 101: A Basic Guide to Digital Art History that was a summary of resources reflecting the programmatic participation, various collaborations, and colloquium events that occurred during the course of the institutes, as well as additional research. The online resources is designed to introduce the fields of digital humanities and digital art history and provide an orientation to topics like data, visualization, space, 3D, and pedagogy. I also built the environment using Jekyll, an open source content management system (CMS) for building static web pages that are less vulnerable to hacking than other CMS’s, which I taught myself, along with Github, in order to push my code to an open repository where it could be added to and updated over time.

After gathering together specialized tutorials, lists of tools, and related projects and readings for this final online publication, I appreciate how critical it is to document a project and its communications efficiently and curate data carefully to support project goals and deliverables, whatever the content may be. Projects like USC’s Scalar gave me the idea to point to outside resources rather than host them independently. I had helped to build two Wordpress sites for the Beyond the Digitized Slide Library: Digital Art History Institutes, where many relevant resources were stored. However, I was not aware that our team had not worked out an understanding regarding security updating with our system administrators and the sites were badly hacked to the point where the websites had to be taken down. This resulted in many broken links on the DAH101 website. Had I been able to adhere to a consistent file storage system for the Beyond the Digitized Slide Library website, I may have been able to remedy the situation. However, as happens with conference events, many resources came to me at the last minute and so I updated the WordPress sites in an ad hoc manner, which was not conducive to long-term preservation. I spoke in detail about the lessons learned from this project at the DH Infrastructure Symposium at UCLA in 2017, which prompted a productive conversation with system administrators where we were able to think collaboratively about how to create a pipeline for projects like this, so that clear understandings of responsibility and best practices can be established prior to the work.

TOOLS

Wordpress

Google Docs

Jekyll

GitHub

WEBSITE

http://program.dh.ucla.edu/getty/

ASSOCIATED OUTCOMES

DH Infrastructure Symposium, UCLA, CA, 2016 and 2017

Presented “The Making of the Digital Art History 101 Website.”

http://cdh.ucla.edu/events/digital-humanities-infrastructure-symposium-2017/

DATE(S)

JANUARY 2016 – DECEMBER 2016