Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
CHArt ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Technology and ‘the death of Art History’
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Hubertus Kohle
Fluid data. Cooperation on the Internet?
In my talk I would like to discuss two projects developed at the institute for art history/ Munich which both insist on an aspect to my mind central for the future development of our subject. This aspect can broadly be defined as the cooperative dimension, to date still underdeveloped in all the humanities which traditionally rely on solitary work in the ivory tower.
“Artigo” (http://artigo.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/) is an online annotation game trying to invite the “crowds” to tag images. Drawing on Luis von Ahn's idea of “games with a purpose” two players unknown to each other but interconnected in the WWW describe art images, and their tags are only matched in case that the other player enters the same word. The basic concept is that only huge numbers of players are able to annotate vast and ever growing image databases already existant but not yet sufficiently made accessible. But the properties of the tags/matches can also be analyzed in different and fascinating ways. What do they implicitly say about the quality of the images? Will they be able to define qualities of style, when giant masses of them are clustered? Will a woman tag differently from a male? An Asian from a European? A well educated from a less well?
“Kunstgeschichte. Open peer reviewed journal” (http://www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/) introduces a much embattled system of publication synthetically described as “publish first, filter later”. The publication process is traditionally based on a peer reviewing process which in the internet might not be adequate anymore. Articles published in our new journal are discussed and evaluated only post festum, and we believe that such evaluation processes after publication can also show us ways to handle the otherwise unmanageable masses of data in the internet.
Art history and the other humanities will always have a tendency to solitary work in the ivory tower. With the internet, though, we will have to add other dimensions in some way essential to their survival.