Our conversation in the Colloquium flowed smoothly and I attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that we were so well provisioned with content: in almost every session we were able to look at an array of websites as case studies, in depth, and from the vantage point of the sites’ creators. The digital world—which seems almost god-given when encountered cold, on the screen—came alive as a highly personal environment, rich in the human voice, and replete with good intentions, ambitions fulfilled and frustrated, doubts, and of course the eternal quest for funding. A certain amount of our discussion was taken up with the difficulties that we faced as practitioners in and users of the web. Some of the problems could only be described as inevitable and natural given the newness or even radicalness of the undertaking. I see another group of them in retrospect, however, now quite differently. When professors at a university of the level of MIT routinely put their syllabi online for the world to use they should be thanked profusely for their generosity but also in some sense for their public recognition of what is in fact a logical consequence of the web: access to information. The web calls for, or perhaps more accurately demands a new level of public spiritedness and sense of social responsibility and in light of the web, it becomes clearer every day that institutions can no longer predicate their existence on the cordoning off, the secreting or the hoarding of information. A red flag should be raised when the naysayers enter the arena: for example, those who refuse to take into account for tenure work published on the web or for a web resource or website, however brilliant, innovative and useful. In fact, publication on the web should not be problematic, in any form, vetted or not. Some of the best papers readily available online are accessible through the individual author’s website. The testimony to their quality is the nature and quality of the conversation that they stimulate. Another question that crops up constantly is that of longevity: how can we be sure that what we entrust to the digital environment will be there generations or even just years down the road, given the inexorable and rapid rate of change in both hardware and software? Of course the issue is worth discussing, but it should not become something brandished to instill fear or doubt or to undercut progress in this crucial arena. When, in the history of culture, has a medium ever been held accountable in this way? The red flag that should be raised is the red flag of self interest: in whose interest is the web being suppressed, curtailed or disciplined? Is it in the interest of those communities of users that are constantly in the process of being configured and reconfigured? Or in the interest of traditional institutions whose edges and boundaries once seemed so firm and fixed? It is clear that the web can accommodate traditional modes of scholarly discourse. But its future is in creating new possibilities of expression, one of whose prime beneficiaries should be the discipline of thought that works constantly between the visual and the verbal: art history.

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