The Clark colloquium The Portals of Art History brought together a variety of perspectives on the current and future state of art history online. It enabled international experts engaged in producing, publishing, critiquing and shaping the future of online art information to discuss many key questions facing our field today. Including representatives from individually-run sites, small organizations, as well as major institutions, the colloquium covered dozens of important issues, among them: 1) the value of gatekeeping, authority, editorial/curatorial decision-making; 2) the challenges in building international understanding, multilingual publishing; 3) the benefits of new technologies, blogs, listservs; and, 4) whether art history has been irrevocably changed by the internet and the digital age.

While technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, it seems art history online is still sustained by traditional editorial and curatorial criteria. That is, our community of art historians, art librarians, artists, collectors, students and researchers still values specialized and accurate visual arts information but wants the content delivered in the digital medium. For ease of access, searchability and efficiency, the online medium outperforms the print format. The marriage of authoritative content with new technology grants us access to information unhampered by time and geographical boundaries.

From institutionally established resources such as, the Timeline of Art History (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press) and ARTstor (initiated by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to independent sites such as n.paradoxa, Art History Resources on the Web, L’Observatoire-Critique, Latinart.com, La Tribune de l’Art, 19th-century Art Worldwide and h-arthist.net, all share a common concern for maintaining editorial quality, and where possible, editorial autonomy. So despite some prophecies of the inevitable obsolescence of ‘vetted’ online resources due to the rapid growth of free publicly edited resources-Wikipedia, etc., we found that our ‘juried’ resources still maintain thousands of devoted readers. Whether subscription-based, free, funded or supported by advertising-all of these resources provide invaluable information sought after by the art community.

The myriad benefits of publishing online include greater flexibility to include general information as well as highly specialized content, lengthier articles, images, multimedia, archiving and searching. Yet barriers to online scholarly publishing had more to do with cultural conceptions of the printed book or journal being more ‘authoritative’ than an online publication. However, these notions are changing rapidly and will soon erode as the next generation of scholars emerges and online publications gain increased legitimacy.

While the online medium has no physical boundaries, the barriers to building international understanding have more to do with language complexities than with technical limitations. Translating art historical scholarship into multiple languages is problematic not only in terms of translation costs, but also in terms of scholarly accuracy. At the same time, user-participant driven resources such as blogs and listservs are attracting greater numbers of scholars, academics and art historians and increasing opportunities for international dialogue. It is still too early to assess whether our sites are truly serving an international community or just various local communities.

Indeed the study of the visual arts has been transformed by the digital age-we are able to view works art more easily than ever before, obtain primary and secondary source material without leaving our homes, communicate with scholars and experts within seconds, and garner a great deal of art information with lower costs in less time. However, the essence of art history has not been altered by technology, but instead by new methodology. The physical objects (the artwork, the art book, the actual documents, etc.) will likely never be replaced as the online medium only facilitates better access to information on these objects or to surrogates of these objects. The future of art history depends not upon technology, but rather the choices we make to take advantage of new technologies in order for the field to thrive.

> Réagir à cet article...

Autres Aperçus Singuliers :
> Introduction
> K. Deepwell
>B. Kelley Jr
> M. Ledbury
> M. Marmor
> W. Tronzo
> C. Welger-Barboza