The thematic feature deals with different aspects of the online offer or with discussed topics. It aims to show resources in the light of critical analysis, according to various approaches. It induces interviews, personal accounts and thoughts of personalities involved in the use or in the creation of these digital realizations.
Universities and Research Centers online
As any institutions, Art history education and research centers (Archaeology will be the subject of a specific feature) have been acquiring online presentations in the last few years. These universities or research centers’ websites represent our first field of investigation. They are a privileged way to question the relations between art history and the web. On the one hand, research in the many fields of the discipline seems the ablest to produce reliable digital resources, useful to the whole art history community. On the other hand, the education institution is the place of the passing on and of the future of the discipline. For us, in this perspective, the understanding of new tools created by the generalization of online digitization, if proven to be able to renew education and research practices, appears to concern first and foremost the future art historians.
Beyond a simple institutional display, which approaches of the Internet device are appearing in the abundant online offer of universities and research centers’ websites ? This questioning will aim to show the initiatives which not only express an interesting appropriation of this new environment, but promote enriching uses for the discipline. It underlies the first article, “The way of making use of the Web” (De la façon d’exploiter le Web). A second article, “Towards a new sharing of the image” (Vers un nouveau partage de l’image) is devoted to the key question of the Image’s uses, firstly for teaching and studying. Various instances, discovered on the Web, make it possible to consider the diverse leads explored by the protagonists, thanks to this new environment.
Future articles and interviews, but also your reactions, comments or contributions, will gradually develop this thematic feature.
Summary :
The way of making use of the Web
This article does not intend to show an exhaustive survey of the Art history universities and research centers’ websites. It makes an inventory of the institution’s own ways to make use of the web’s environment. The suggested links serve only as illustrations. These examples compose a sample specimens. Two significant repertories helped this surveying : Braintrack University Index, and the Index of art history department’s websites around the world, a very useful tool (even if some links are not active anymore) created by the late Art history webmasters association. Archaeology is not addressed here : it will be the subject of a specific feature.
This links’ selection draws on the present online offer, without prejudging the disciplinary significance of any entity. The examples are also taken in the small or medium-sized universities or in others which escape us. From this survey’s angle, the established cartography of recognized centers is noticeably destabilized as to the way to invest the new medium.
The analysis of the websites of higher education and of research in Art history allows us to show numerous similar characteristics which directly relate to these institutions’ mission. But the conventional functions and the way to convey them and to equip them with tools often lead to new impulses. With this inventory of “doings”, we hope to shed light on some stakes of the involvement in open digitization policies on the net and, maybe encourage initiatives still rare.
> Read more (in French)
Towards a new sharing of the image
The image importance in research and study in Art history is obvious. The possibility to see works of art’s images is deeply connected to art history as well as the forming of the taught discipline. Copies, drawings, engravings, photographies offset the punctual or lasting impossibility to have access to the very works to study them. The digital happened, and moreover, the networked digital.
In the universities’ art history departments, the digitization laboratories are progressively supplanting the photographic laboratories. In the research centers, this movement is older, allowed by a more intimate integration of documentary and computer knowledge and skills. Scholars are most of the time images’ producers, rather than merely images’ breeders.
The university’s need for images put up with varied makeshifts, such as reproducing images published in books or art journals, building up individual or collective collections thanks to personal shots on location, or buying reproductions from the patrimonial institutions. Will digitization favour a new way of sharing images ? We want to shed light on the possible answers to this question by singling out the situations in higher education.
For most universities, digitization is seen as a more topical way of renewing the same practices - works’ images used mostly for illustration of lectures, seminars communications, etc. Concerning printed publications, scholars are not in control anymore. Nevertheless, digital format paired with networking prove to bear irresistibly change as much for images disposal as for their use. The general hardening of images rights legislation considerably restrains the practices : the renewal of conventions should not benefit from the usual tolerances, and innovation is not stimulated.
Despite the numerous obstructions, we are opting here for the inexorability of the movement under way. Networking offers new prospects in images sharing and mutualising for teaching and research. The online offer of images from training and research centers shows various situations, even if it favours more or less organized images databases. We will analyse this diversity by following a dynamic which starts with the transposition/transformation of conventions and ends up with the beginning of new sharing prospects. Moreover, the developments easily spotted on the web furthermore question the prevailing economical patterns of images supplying in this area. Finally, we are able to outline various figures of appropriation which are cast by the producers of the offer. But the future of practices defies these preconceived plans owing to the digital format’s extreme fluidity. If the Internet apparatus enables a transnational access to online documents, including iconographical documents, the processing capacities of each operator in front of his terminal are uneven, and pushes onward the limitations of appropriation. Consequently, in this configuration, intelligence is at the ends of the apparatus.
“I am experimenting by immersion”
Interview with André Gunthert about Actualités de la recherche en histoire visuelle, the LHIVIC’s blog. The blog has been interfering in the on-lining chorus of the art history education and research centers. An instance, still isolated, illustrates this innovation in France. On the website of the EHESS’s Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine (Visual Contemporary History Laboratory), André Gunthert has created the Actualités de la recherche en histoire visuelle (The News in Research in Visual History) blog. In so doing, he took the chance of the opening, of the exchanges’ quickness and of the public debate. Its impact was revealed upon the discussion about Roland Recht’s book : its tone was quite surprising, considering the usual quietness of the exchanges in the discipline. He has agreed to answer our questions as part of this thematic feature.
“Beyond institutional communication, digital edition...”
The Ecole nationale des Chartes’ website stands out thanks to its resourceful documentary offer for students, as for teachers and scholars. In this interview, Gautier Poupeau, editorial and technical manager of the Ecole nationale des chartes’ website, throws light on the origin of this website and on the choices prevailing in its original offers. The history of this institution’s website merges with the career of this young man, passionately interested in digital edition. His work is well-known internationally, beyond the status hierarchies which are a strain on the institutional dynamism which is required to participate in the birth of the french digital humanities.
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