With this post, I am beginning a conversation, mostly intended for colleagues at my own institution, but for anyone else who might be reading, to present small pieces of what we learned at Rebuilding the Portfolio (see previous posts for more on RTP).  The two weeks of immersive learning we had at the workshop were amazing, but for those who couldn’t be there, and who are reading from their normal, slightly frenetic work life, sharing what we learned in small chunks seems the best option.

So with apologies for mangling and possibly misrepresenting the beautifully crafted curriculum created by Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon and the rest of their team at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, here is a first pass at our learning.

Laying a common ground of  definitions and scanning the scholarly landscape together is always a good way to begin working with a new group, and that tactic served us well for RTP.  A good short read is Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (2012). The author, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and co-founder of MediaCommons, presented a brief history of the field itself, the term ‘digital humanities’, and an account of the tensions, as the field expands, between those interacting in different ways with the digital. Is “every medievalist with a website” a digital humanities scholar?

We also read the report published in 2012 by Diane Zorich, Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, Its Research Centers and Digital Scholarship. Commissioned by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and carried out in partnership with the Center for History and New Media, the report was based on interviews and site visits to art history research centers. Diane is well-known at the Smithsonian, and several Freer|Sackler staff were interviewed for the report, which provides a very good account of the state of digital art history at the time of her work, and of the challenges that need to be addressed in specific areas, particularly training in digital research methods for art historians, the changing role of art libraries and art librarians, and the establishment of shared evaluative criteria for digital work in art history.

A third useful piece about the digital art history landscape today is the report published by Ithaka S+R, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art Historians.  Ithaka S+R is a consulting service (part of ITHAKA, along with J Stor and Portico) providing expertise in helping various sectors of the research community transition to the digital. This study was commissioned jointly by the Getty Foundation and the Kress Foundation and published in April 2014. A draft version was presented in February 2014 at the annual conference of the College Art Association. The focus of the report was providing information for art history research destinations (museums among them) about how to make their research resources more accessible for digitally-based scholarship.  A major take-away from this report for me was the fact that most graduate programs do not provide very much in the way of digital training for their students. This means if museums want the next generation of museum curators to be digitally literate, we need to take steps to achieve that.

Next up: what is out there already.