Through a week of reading, I have come to realize that Digital Art History is an immensely vast subject. In my understanding, Digital Art History can be divided into two parts: the digitization of works of art and image collections, and the use of advanced technological tools to aid the study of art history.

The digitization of works of art and image collections can be considered the starting point of art history digitization. Visual Arts Systems for Archiving and Retrieval of Images have become an indispensable part of museum websites today. However, online collections of artworks are far from the simple task of uploading high-resolution scans of artworks onto a website, as I previously assumed. Online collections involve categorizing artworks based on their visual characteristics. Imagine the immense task of labeling tens of thousands of artworks from museum collections manually with simple tags, such as their genre, period, or type. During the digitization process, researchers proposed more complex classifications, such as local visual qualities—lines, colors, patterns, textures, and shapes.

In the article Forgotten Genealogies: Brief Reflections on the History of Digital Art History, the author mentions the MORELLI project led by William Vaughan. This project does not solely rely on traditional database metadata but extracts relevant features, such as composition and tonality, during the digitization of artworks. Such extensive archives far surpass what humans could catalog through simple records. Moreover, these massive automated archives can link images in ways that text references alone could never achieve—an almost unimaginable advancement.

Since many of these online archives are established by major museums and galleries on their websites, another topic comes into play: the long-debated distinction between online and offline exhibition experiences. In The Museum Opens, the author discusses how traditional museums rely on physical exhibits and the layout of their spaces to convey historical and cultural meanings. Virtual museums, however, leverage digital technologies and multimedia to offer more flexible and interactive experiences. That said, as highlighted in Digital Art History Has a Fraught Relationship to History and Interpretation, digital exhibitions and images have their drawbacks. The author expresses concern that with the advancement of digitization, viewers may experience a “decontextualization” process where the original context of artworks is lost, and their experience becomes more reliant on the arrangement of images. This “distant viewing” approach can lead to a sense of detachment when faced with an overwhelming number of images.

I must admit that physical exhibitions offer a unique advantage in providing a tangible environment, curated arrangement of artworks, and a cohesive narrative—elements that online exhibitions struggle to replicate. However, online exhibitions can still benefit from advanced technologies, such as VR headsets that recreate offline exhibition settings for a more authentic experience. Additionally, incorporating more interactive features into online exhibitions could enhance audience engagement.

Digital art collections have also expanded beyond traditional art forms, such as paintings, sculptures, and installations, to embrace visualization techniques, such as modeling historical sites and mapping historical data to document art history. Scholars are now employing technologies like text analysis, spatial analysis, network analysis, and image analysis to process and analyze large datasets. These advancements enable the virtual restoration of historical landmarks. For instance, the article mentions the project Mapping the Architecture of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, which illustrates how the camp’s evolving structures influenced life within. By incorporating temporal features into spatial data, the project provides insights into the camp’s dynamic layout, challenging traditional static perceptions.

Similarly, the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral has drawn on data recorded in the video game Assassin’s Creed Unity. Designer Caroline Miousse, after countless visits to the cathedral and collaborations with historians, spent over two years creating a 1:1 digital replica of Notre-Dame, capturing every detail for the game. Such digital documentation serves as a virtual archive, preserving historical landmarks against unforeseen disasters, accidents, or wars. Accelerating the digital archiving of historical sites holds immense value for art history studies and real-world restoration efforts.

As mentioned earlier, even within the realm of digital art collections, researchers are moving toward greater precision and detail. This shift aligns with the second aspect of Digital Art History: using technological tools to assist art historical research. The article Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora introduces distant viewing, an essential technique in artwork analysis. Distant viewing involves encoding and aggregating metadata extracted from images to analyze visual data on a large scale. This approach identifies overarching patterns across collections that might remain undetected through traditional close analysis of individual images.

The distant viewing framework draws on visual semiotics, acknowledging that images convey meaning differently from text. By leveraging computer vision, it automatically extracts this information, providing vital technological support for art historical research. Many studies in art history, including my own, focus on issues like authenticity and attribution. For instance, several paintings attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi and her father, Orazio Gentileschi, remain indistinguishable. Art historians typically differentiate their works based on their depiction of hands—Artemisia’s are more angular, while Orazio’s are softer. In future research, I aim to use distant viewing techniques to compare metadata in detail. However, I am apprehensive about implementing distant viewing, as I am unfamiliar with its technical aspects. Collaborating with computer scientists to develop culturally informed algorithms will be necessary. Thus, digital art history remains inaccessible for individual researchers and typically requires interdisciplinary collaboration on larger projects.

Digital Art History also has its drawbacks. As discussed in Digital Art History Has a Fraught Relationship to History and Interpretation, analyzing texts and images through algorithms to generate themes and patterns may reveal new phenomena but risks oversimplifying interpretations, lacking the depth of historical and cultural context. Technology often presents itself as providing “objective access” to reality, a perspective that is highly contested. The involvement of technology can lead to the reconstruction of historical facts, raising the question of whether these “facts” are discovered or produced. Digital Art History may overlook the subjective interpretations of causal relationships central to the humanities. Therefore, while technology offers new perspectives and tools, it may oversimplify complex historical and cultural phenomena, potentially distorting and misinterpreting artworks.

In conclusion, Digital Art History is a vast field that intersects with many aspects of art history. It requires interdisciplinary collaboration between humanists and computer scientists and has evolved beyond digital archiving to include historical site restoration, visual mapping, and semiotic classification. With technological advancements, Digital Art History will undoubtedly progress further, addressing current limitations in authenticity and interactivity. However, while Digital Art History has significantly advanced the field, over-reliance on it may lead to superficial interpretations of artworks and the commodification of evaluation criteria. Thus, it is essential to respect the historical and cultural contexts of the humanities and the deeper meanings behind artworks, avoiding oversimplification and misinterpretation in the process.