Via Middlebury News Room.

Location: Middlebury, VT
Dates: August 3 -15, 2014
Deadline: March 3, 2014
Open to all art historians of any rank including undergraduates, graduate students, curators, or independent scholars
Cost: covered by fellowships. See description for details.
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
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), 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.

Large bodies of data used in our discipline almost inevitably have a spatial component and the analysis of this evidence in visual terms plays to the art historical strength in visual analysis. 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 amendable 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.

The Geography Department at Middlebury College has a long history of innovative teaching and research with spatial methods, including the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) across the humanities and social science. Such a center provides the workshop components of the Institute with excellent facilities and expert faculty and support staff. Bolstered with two outside speakers who are specialists in digital art historical and geographic visualization, Middlebury will be an ideal environment for the Institute. Participating Fellows will be trained in GIS and other methods of geovisualization relevant to their particular research interests, and will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various digital spatial platforms.

Within such an amenable environment, the Summer Institute will bring together digital spatial thinkers with art historians and their intellectual problems. 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 approach (GIS and the visualization of space). Graduating Fellows will have the vocabulary and intellectual grounding 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. We also encourage applications from clusters of two – three fellows who are working in a similar art historical area and who wish to foster their potential collaboration, or professors could apply with one – two graduate or undergraduate students to work as a team. All geographies, time periods, and subareas of art history will be considered.

Fellowship winners will be announced by March 31. Fellowships pay for tuition, room, and board, and provide a travel stipend for all participants.

Full application details at the Kress Foundation website.