GETTY SCHOLARS’ WORKSPACE

While I was trained as an art historian, my introduction to the field of digital art history was through my position as the research assistant and project coordinator to the head of the Digital Art History department at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Dr. Murtha Baca. I assisted with projects, conferences, and communications related to the development of digital tools and resources for art-historical scholars, including but not limited to virtual research environments, digital text registries, and searchable, multilingual, controlled vocabularies related to art and architecture. I also conducted tasks related to project and grant proposals, project and event budgets, logistical arrangements, and evaluations, meeting coordination and agendas, management of production schedules, and presentations regarding work progress and production.

During my time at the GRI, I served as the interim project manager for the development of the Getty Scholars’ Workspace™ , a content management system with a digital toolset specifically designed for conducting art-historical research and publication, which included monitoring the progress and schedule of various projects in different phases of production within the workspace; communicating with project stakeholders, management, technical developers, and other relevant parties; coordinating the work of various teams and departments; and monitoring project quality to ensure project deliverables are acceptable and fulfill the terms of the grant proposal. Additionally, I wrote preliminary user manuals for newly developed software and trained scholars to use the new environment to conduct research.

The Getty Scholars’ Workspace™ was formed as an overarching project that was to support the completion of the work on the Mellini manuscript and begin a template for other digital art history projects to come including “Digital Montagny” and “Digital Kirchner.” To further contextualize and historicize the changes that I have witness during my time in the field of digital art history, I plan to survey and examine seminal projects from early instances of digital art history, like The William Blake Archive and Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters, to the most recent documentation and examples, such as the final report on the Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI) published this year (Baca and Helmreich 2013).

TOOLS

Drupal

Confluence

JIRA

The Getty Scholars’ Workspace™

WEBSITE

http://www.getty.edu/research/scholars/research_projects/index.html#completed

ASSOCIATED OUTCOMES

DIGITAL KIRCHNER

http://www.getty.edu/research/scholars/research_projects/index.html#completed

DATE(S)

AUGUST 2011 – JUNE 2015