Cool! Middlebury made a Summer Institute for Itinera!
Middlebury, Vermont, August 3 - 15, 2014
Deadline: Mar 3, 2014
Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History
Call for Applicants
Middlebury College, Middlebury VT
August 3-15, 2014
Middlebury College is pleased to invite applications for Fellows to
participate in the first Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art
History (August 3-15, 2014), generously sponsored by the Samuel H.
Kress Foundation. Co-directed by Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University) and
Anne Kelly Knowles (Middlebury College), the Summer Institute will
emphasize how digital mapping of art historical evidence can open up
new veins of research in art history as a whole. All art historians of
any rank (including graduate students, curators, or independent
scholars) with a scholarly problem related to spatial evidence or
questions are encouraged to apply.
Whether talking about the spreading influence of Rembrandt’s workshop,
Haussmann’s Plan of Paris, the Roman Forum, the caves of Dunhuang, the
views of Edo, the market for Impressionist painting, the looting of
assets by Napoleon, the movement of craftsmen over the medieval
pilgrimage road, or the current proliferation of art expos globally,
art history is peppered with spaces, both real and imagined. As such,
spatial questions are central to many art historical problems, and
visualizing spatial questions of different physical and temporal scales
is an intellectual and technical problem amenable to the digital
environment. Building the capacity to think spatially in geographic
terms will carry an art historian a long way towards developing
sophisticated questions and answers by exploiting the digital
environment.
At the end of the two-week period, Fellows will have a grounding in the
intellectual and historiographic issues central to digital humanities,
basic understanding of the conceptual nature of data and the use of a
database, an exposure to important examples of digital art history in
the field, and a more in-depth study of one particular digital approach
(GIS and the visualization of space). Graduating Fellows will have the
vocabulary and intellectual foundation to participate in on-going
digital humanities debates or other specialized digital humanities
workshops while also gaining important practical and conceptual
knowledge in mapping that they can begin to apply to as scholars and
teachers.
Given this focus, our Institute will be ideal for those art historians
who already have identified a spatial problem in their work. Note,
though, that no prior knowledge or experience in digital humanities
will be necessary or assumed for the application process. Naturally,
general awareness of the scholarly potential of the digital
environment or mapping will be a plus. All geographies, time periods,
and subareas of art history will be considered.
For questions, please contact at any time the co-directors
Paul B. Jaskot, pjaskot@depaul.edu; Anne Kelly Knowles,
aknowles@middlebury.edu