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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Gill Perry and Linda Wilks
Open Access to Art? The Open Arts Archive: Dissemination and Collaboration
This paper addresses ‘Access and participation’ conference theme, and also has relevance for themes of collaboration, communication and dissemination, and pedagogy and teaching.
This paper will be structured around a case study of The Open Arts Archive (http://openartsarchive.org). It will set this case study within the wider context of a critical examination of the role of digital technology in the expansion and evolution of the discipline of Art History, and its potential for collaboration.
The Open Arts Archive is a major website and archive, which went live in March 2010, and is funded by the Open University (OU) and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). The Archive is hosted by the Art History Department at the OU and provides open access to a wide range of artistic and cultural resources. As well as aiming to benefit practitioners and students of art and art history, the facility also aims to transfer knowledge to a much broader public audience, thus widening access to art and education.The Art History Department at the OU supports and co-organises gallery based events across the UK, filming on site at the galleries, and archiving the outputs for online access. The archived resources, which include seminars, study days, artist interviews, curatorial debates and research projects, are supported or produced by the OU in collaboration with a national network of museums and galleries. At present over fifteen galleries and art institutions across the UK are involved as collaborators including the Tate (since 2002), the Barbican, the V&A, the Baltic, the Walker Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, Milton Keynes Gallery, the Bowes Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery.
The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will describe the setting up and delivery of the website, and explore the possibilities and limitations of digital representations of ‘unique’ objects. Issues of sustained and open access, collaboration, dissemination, pedagogy and cross-fertilisation, which have underpinned the project, will also be examined. The second part of the paper will report on a critical review of the project, carried out by the OU’s Digital Humanities team. The review will look at how well the project is meeting its goals and focus particularly on the ways in which digital technologies have helped or hindered this process. It is hoped that others will find these insights useful for their own projects.