This important question may need a little rephrasing. The textbook is of course not a given, but rather, the result of a particular technology and a reflection of the needs and interests of a specific historical moment. The textbook promised the comprehensive treatment of its subject, accuracy, and a single, coherent, sequential structure.

The web has shown that these premises are limited and our students seem to know this. Perhaps this is because in their experience knowledge seems more expansive, intricate, dynamic, and cumulative and the very notion that a bound and static textbook that purports to be comprehensive is for them, inherently suspect. Diderot’s noble belief that his great Encyclopédie could contain the full extent of “each and every branch of human knowledge” was beautiful and wildly ambitious, but it was an expression of the mid-18th century Enlightenment.

Must we remain bound, even through metaphor, to the print textbook as a model? The economics of print technology required standardized editions that fail to reflect the fluidity of knowledge. We now have an incredible opportunity to invent an entirely new means with which to introduce and interact with a given discipline. Let’s leave the metaphor of the textbook behind us. Instead, open, networked learning should aggregate and respond to discovery and analysis in real time while drawing relevant materials from resources across a spectrum of disciplines. Further, we can include many more voices and create much more engaging models for learning.

Dr. Beth Harris and I created Smarthistory.org, a conversation-based multimedia art history web-book to begin to do exactly this.

Add your thoughts to the conversation over at the Next Generation blog.

Next Gen: Learning Challenges is a partnership of leaders in education seeking to make students more successful. They asked us to contribute a post that engaged the organization’s four key challenges. Find it here.

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design held its annual exhibition design symposium at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills last week and inexplicably asked me to give the opening keynote address. The title was “Innovation in the Way We Learn, Interpret, and Share Information,” and you can get a nice sense of it on the SEGD blog.

Also, keep an eye out for Meg Florian, Smarthistory contributor extraordinaire and currently guest blogger over at Art:21.

I love it! It’s very much about his experience of standing in front of the church and entering it – and he speaks directly to us – trying to share that experience with us. He translates the name of the Church for us and explains why it has attracted worshipers for centuries (no, not Moses, but St. Peter’s chains). He talks about the lights going on and off and he shows all the tourists taking pictures. Now I’ve taught Michelangelo’s Moses for many years and never showed the outside of this church. In fact, I’ve never translated the name of the Church and explained the relic that is there. I teach Moses in the context of Michelangelo’s oeuvre and the patronage of Pope Julius II, as I imagine most art historians do. I talk about Julius II’s vision for Rome, for the Papacy and for himself. I show Michelangelo’s ambitious sketches for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and I show what the tomb looks like today – usually with an image like this one – tourist free of course. I talk about the High Renaissance approach to the body – as a vehicle for expressing the spiritual and emotional.

Went I was in Rome visiting San Pietro in Vincoli,  I was surprised by how the exterior of the church looked and by the pannini/snack cart permanently parked outside it to serve the throngs of tourists who came to see this Michelangelo masterpiece. I didn’t know where to find the monument within the church. I shot one video to show tourists, and a couple more of the outside of the church, and another one of entering the church and approaching the Tomb – will post those soon, though this one is up now on Smarthistory.  Perhaps what I like about zThirdTry’s video is that it shows me a different perspective – a tourist perspective, a tourist who is very interested in art – but who is also a religious person. I think that’s what is missing from the art history textbook – those different perspectives. So, I guess the questions are – do we agree those are important, and if so, what’s the best way to bring those in?

Here is her most recent dispatch:

Nothing I learned in graduate school or during years of study and teaching prepared me for Santa Maria del Popolo and the Caravaggios in the Cerasi Chapel. Nothing prepared me for the way the church is situated in an inconspicuous corner of the enormous Piazza del Popolo, or the woman begging on the steps, or the swirling frisbee-like souvenirs that light up when they are tossed high in the air that are being sold in the Piazza, or the traffic that streams by the church and its very worn steps and narrow door, or the people praying close to the altar, or the lights that go on and off in the chapel as tourists contribute Euros, or the way each chapel in the church looks so very different, or the way this particular chapel is just beside the altar, or how works of art from different periods combine in this one church, or the colors of the marble surrounding the paintings, or the way the paintings’ meaning is affected because they face each other in a narrow chapel—Paul blinded and chosen, Peter crucified.

Nothing I have seen in Rome has looked or felt the way I imagined it would. Flickr images of the church and Square and YouTube videos of the interior of the church help, sure—but not a lot. I’m a well-trained art historian. I understand the importance of looking at objects in the location they were made for. I value historical context. I appreciate the tools of visual analysis art history has given me. But Steven and I wonder if there is a way to teach these objects while still allowing them to be living objects in the world.

The following was co-written by us both:

Should we have been better prepared for Santa Maria del Popolo or the numerous other similar encounters throughout the city? What is art history’s responsibility to us and to its students in this regard? Should our discipline offer a more comprehensive and current context for the objects we study? In class, we often show paintings such as Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter—isolated, against a black background, as an object of empirical analysis—and too often as an example of a “style.” The caption in the book, or the entry on an image list we hand to our students does little or nothing to even suggest the range of factors that will affect our viewing experience in person.

Edward Said argued that the West depicted the “Orient” removed from history thus creating a timeless world—and by so doing, creating the comforting distance the West needed to compare itself and feel superior and justified. Perhaps it’s time to ask what it is that we that gain when we photograph frescoes from impossible angles, and without the worshipers, tourists, lights and noise that embed the work of art in a living city.

Art history’s form and methods were largely established in response to 18th and 19th century needs and interests. Many of these driving forces remain of course; there is still a thriving art market hungry for authenticity and other narratives that create value. As in centuries past, art’s history is still prized as an extraordinarily rich cultural strand and perhaps most importantly, our discipline has created a language and experience of seeing that is deeply enriching. However, our success has also lead to our failure. The nineteenth century empiricism that structured the discipline removes the experience—the emotion of the tourist and art history student (not to mention the pious then and now) and the sensual environment of many of these objects. As we all know, the discipline is no longer the sanctuary of an elite minority. Twenty-first century art history is taught to secondary and college students as a matter of course. It is no longer unusual for community college students to be asked to differentiate the work of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, ambitious high school students regularly enroll in advance placement art history classes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most-visited tourist attraction in New York. All of this suggests to us that perhaps it is time to re-examine the assumptions and conceits built into the art history survey and its methods of instruction. We know that thousands throng to visit works of art in situ the way the pious once made pilgrimage—so why not acknowledge this reality more openly in our survey classes and texts?

The ideological battles of the 1970s and 80s opened our discipline to numerous theoretical models and far broader historical contexts but our experience tells us that we have not gone far enough—especially in the classroom. We teach taxonomies infused with study of the period in which the artist created and rarely (if the circumstances are dramatic enough) we may discuss the later life of the object. For example, when the painting by Caravaggio, The Conversion of Paul is taught, its formal elements, available biographical information about the artist, patronage, and the broader context of Counter-Reformation Rome are all treated. In essence, we teach what we can of the meanings we believe this painting had at the start of the seventeenth century when it was produced. But what we don’t do is explicitly acknowledge to our students that the painting continues to accrue meaning and in fact exists in our present not simply as a canonical support of our construction of the Early Italian Baroque but as a real object, deeply embedded in the fabric of a living city and tourist industry now.

Can we develop a survey that treats art in its historical context while also situating it in our contemporary experience? What would that look like for the Caravaggio? In addition to primary source materials and art historical analysis, perhaps we should make room for urban historians and environmental psychologists, for those who regularly worship in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the tourists who visit. We might include curated Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and details from Google Earth. Understanding the ways a painting is understood now, wouldn’t diminish Caravaggio’s achievement, but might provide a means for students and visitors to engage the art more deeply and personally. We understand the enormous importance of seeing works of art first-hand, but some of our students may never have that opportunity, can we give them some sense of the reality of the current life of the work we ask them to study?

We pointed out that since the 1970s, colleges and universities have produced far more Ph.Ds than the academy could possibly absorb and that because of the greater reliance on adjunct faculty, this trend has continued. In the days since the conference, and quite independently, a discussion thread has developed on the listserv, Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians (CAAH) titled, “On the joys and desperation of art history.” It has been heartrending to hear the struggles of young academics and older, now wiser adjuncts that never did land a tenure-track job. One issue that both the listserv thread and our conference paper have in common are the implications of “Plan B;” the alternate career paths taken out of necessity.

These highly trained professionals have taken jobs in libraries, museums, and other centers of learning beyond the university. At the same time, Web 2.0 technology has created the opportunity for publishing, learning and collaboration anywhere and has empowered these wayward academics. The demographic force of these Ph.D.s coupled with technology, and other pressures is enough to ensure change. Perhaps academia has assured its own creative destruction. Here is my contribution to CAAH:

As nearly everyone has acknowledged, the implications of the trends we are discussing in “On the joys and desperation of art history” are extremely important to the future of our discipline and the humanities as a whole. I want to ask these questions in a slightly different way. What are the implications of a generation of Ph.D.s that find alternate careers in libraries, museums, and other, non-traditional research and teaching environments? Many of the highly trained art historians who work outside of the university will find ways to join together their training and their new careers and they will “teach” and “research” in ways that may not have developed within the academy. We see the education departments of museums now hiring Ph.D.s and being quickly transformed and we see libraries taking on increasingly public roles in research and education (all of this aided by advances in technology). Maybe we should not mourn the loss of the academy of the 20th century but rather focus our collective attention on embracing and supporting this broader universe of scholars.

Perhaps this is too optimistic, but we worry that simply chasing the jobs of the last century will not allow our discipline to survive the next.

Here is the slide show from the conference:

Its been about a year since we launched the latest iteration of Smarthistory.org and I thought I’d post some of the usage statistics gathered via Google Analytics. Over the past year there have been 426,135 visits to Smarthistory with 993,419 page views from 196 countries and territories. We know that our users are students, teachers, museum visitors, creative professionals, travelers, and other informal learners.

Here are the top 25 college and university users based on institutional network visits (most frequent first):
1. Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
2. Harvard University
3. Columbia University
4. University of Florida
5. New York University
6. University of Wisconsin
7. Savannah College of Art and Design
8. University of Georgia
9. University of Rhode Island
10. University of California at Berkeley
11. California State University Network
12. University of Bristol
13. Brigham Young University
14. Rochester Institute of Technology
15. Northern Arizona University
16. Yale University
17. Syracuse University
18. Rutgers University
19. Pratt Institute
20. University of California Los Angeles
21. University of Texas at Austin
22. Art Institutes International
23. University of Missouri-Columbia
24. Penn State
25. University of Colorado

Thank you so much for your interest and support. If you haven’t done so already, please take our very brief survey and help us make Smarthistory.org better.

[Link here to the slides]

But to underscore that the technology is but a vehicle for the content, I couldn’t resist talking a bit about interpretation and different approaches to audio content design as well. We looked at scripted content, which should be more like blog posts written for the ear than recorded versions of object labels; interviews with experts such as artists or curators – always a favorite with audiences; and ‘vox pops’ that incorporate visitors’ opinions, for example, as is common in SFMOMA’s Artcasts; and conversations about art, like SmartHistory.org’s.

To illustrate the conversational approach, I played Beth and Steven’s podcast about American artist Mary Cassatt’s 1894 Breakfast in Bed in the Huntington Library in California, and we talked about how the informal dialectic space models learning, inviting the listener to join the conversation and develop his or her own views of the artwork. Even the speakers’ early disagreement in the podcast about which town they were in serves to reinforce this useful information about the Huntington, while lightening the tone and lending the podcast an approachable atmosphere.

We also looked at the context in which listeners experience the audio content: are they moving through the museum, sitting in the classroom, or on a bus? Are they looking at an artwork or a high-quality image of it online, or is this mainly an audio experience? And is the best vehicle for the podcaster’s message a traditional audio tour ‘stop’ or ‘soundbite’, that focuses on a given artwork in-depth, or is it an overview of a gallery (like this one Beth & I experimented with at the IMA), exhibition or theme that immerses the listener in a ‘soundtrack’ to provide a higher level guide or general tools for understanding an artist, a collection, a period?

Whatever their tack, I recommended that the teachers start with the questions that come immediately to mind for their students when they confront the art under consideration. These will range from the empirical ‘what is this?’ to the philosophical ‘why is it important?’ questions, and will be inflected by the specific content and context of the art. Here are some we collected from visitors to the folk art section of our Luce Foundation Center, an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects in a compact space over three floors of the Museum’s west wing, where we are in the final stages of creating a cross-platform audio tour:

1. What makes folk art, ‘art’? How is folk art different from fine art? Why is it in museums?
2. Who makes folk art? What were the people who made it like?
3. What do the symbols mean?
4. Where does all this stuff come from?
5. What is it made of?
6. Why are fishing lures considered art?
7. What is up with the penguins?
8. Where did all these fish come from? One person or lots of people?
9. I’d like more information about the “memory” idea about the ceramics that have the stones and other objects. Could you give an example from one of these pieces?

The ‘leading with questions’ methodology could come straight out of a market research or customer service manual. By responding to what your listeners have foremost in their minds, you engage them in a mental dialogue that then opens up a space where other ‘key messages’ can be more easily received as well. You validate their questions and interests, so they are more likely to want to listen to what else you have to offer.

Of course the best way to learn is to teach, so another interesting use of audio in the classroom is having students create their own podcasts. The Education Department of the American Art Museum has a very popular student podcast program, in which high school students record their reflections on selected artworks in the collection. Through the process of creating a script about an artwork and listening to their own words, the students’ writing skills improve immeasurably, in addition to their visual arts literacy.

I am now relishing the vision of podcasting and the SmartHistory.org conversational technique being refined throughout American classrooms and engaging future generations more deeply with art through the students that the Clarice Smith teachers will touch. I hope they’ll be as generous in sharing their tips and best practice with the community of art educators as Steven and Beth have been with me!

About Nancy Proctor
Formerly Head of New Product Development at Antenna Audio, Nancy Proctor is now Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She also manages MuseumMobile.info and its wiki and podcast series on mobile interpretation content and technology for cultural sites. Nancy was recently appointed Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal.

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks

Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection.

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition.

So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews. We’ll make sure to post all results here, and plan to develop a related “How-To” section on the Smarthistory site this summer for museums that might want to replicate what we did, though it became very clear to us that having experienced facilitators from the outside was extremely valuable.

Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework”—articles by Rika Burnham (Frick Collection) and Peter Samis (SFMoMA). The homework focused on museum interpretation and included audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Over the course of the two days, each participant had four opportunities to create recordings in the galleries followed by time to listen, reflect and discuss. We experimented with different pairings—curator/curator, curator/educator, educator/educator, educator/docent, and docent/docent. In some pairings an object would be intimately familiar to one of the speakers, while in others, the object was less familiar to both. We also took turns in the mix.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much fun everyone would have. Taking time from busy schedules, going out into the galleries, talking to colleagues about beautiful and interesting objects that they feel a strong sense of attachment to, and creating and editing video that would live on the website—proved a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Several participants described the workshop as therapeutic and restorative.

In our discussions, we explored the following questions –

• Where should the media we created reside—on the website and/or in the galleries? How would it be accessed it the galleries?
• What formats (audio or video, long or short) would be best for those different settings?
• What style was best—an exploratory conversation or a relaxed interview? Is style tied to the purpose of the recording (a gallery overview, to model discovery, or an in-depth explication)?
• Does the conversation’s style depend on the speakers’ roles (docents, curators, educators—or a combination of those) and/or their familiarity and expertise with the object that was discussed?
• What visual material is most useful in the gallery versus on the website? Should visual material be offered in the gallery? If so, what kind of material would be best? Should we use a combination of photos of the image and video of the speakers?

We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. We were able to demonstrate strategies for creating engaging interpretive content as well as how to publish high quality video for in-gallery and web distribution. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants.

We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.

Please let us know if you have questions about the workshop, or if you are interested in running one at your institution.

Warm thanks to Christina Olsen, Bruce Guenther, Gerri Hayes, Kate Burns, Stephanie Parrish, Floyd Sklaver, Jillian Punska, Amy Gray, Maribeth Graybill, & Anna Strankman.

For some time now, we have been publicly questioning the division that exists between two professional groups tasked with educating the public about art: those in museums (curators and educators) and those in the academy (art historians). These two communities share expertise that is sought by the museum visitor and the student, yet they rarely meet, too often do not attend the same conferences, and almost never collaborate.

Teachers in the art history classroom regularly rely on museum resources (the fabulous Vermeer videos for example, created by the National Gallery, or the Eastman House videos to name two of our favorites). Exhibition subsites are also often very useful—but they are expensive to produce. The learning materials developed by professors for their students often reside behind the locked gates of learning management systems, so they are not available to the wider public (open courseware is, of course, the lovely exception). Interestingly, it is usually only via iTunesU that we are able to aggregate content created by these two different communities.

Our overarching point is that these two communities really ought to collaborate because the benefits to those we serve could be enormous. And we have two notions about how we might do that:

Notion 1
Inspired by Koven Smith’s recent paper (given just a couple of weeks ago at Museums and the Web) on the Future of Mobile Interpretation we thought of one way to bring the museum and the academy together. Koven draws attention to the disjunction between the more open and personalized online museum experience—which often allows visitors to browse most (if not all) of the museum’s collection, and even create personal collections of their own—and the experience of the on-site mobile device which contains only limited “stops” and focuses on special exhibitions and highlights from the permanent collection. Koven’s answer to mobile interpretation: make the entire collection available on mobile devices—with the textual accompaniment one finds on the website. And we would add more to that—make it available with interpretation that is conversational, open, personal, opinionated—AND offers expertise.

In a recent blog post Nina Simon noted the disjunction between the on-site experiences and the web experiences even of the same museum, “You may be able to engage a thriving community online, but if their experience with the institution is fundamentally different from the onsite one, they will remain online-only visitors.”

As we discussed with Nancy Proctor and Deb Howes, what if artists and art historians—those with significant expertise in looking at and thinking about art—could be called on to create multimedia (and even text-based) content for the works of art in a museum’s permanent collection? Museums could provide guidelines about what they are looking for, vet the content, and publish to the website and mobile devices only that content that aligned with the institution’s needs. In this way, the museum can begin to move toward becoming a platform and not just a provider.

Notion 2
The Smarthistory Lab
Susan Chun is one of those people for whom great ideas are a dime a dozen. There was one she tossed out over drinks recently that fit perfectly with two strands of thinking we have been grappling with at Smarthistory. On the one hand, we have sought ways to create a community of Smarthistory users and to include and highlight their voices (we are creating comments capability in the newest version) but we had also begun to discuss creating a sandbox, tentatively named the Smarthistory Lab, a neutral ground beyond the cloistered walls of the academy and the fortress-like facades of our museums where experts from across our disciplines can explore collaborative projects. So into this mire, Susan mentions that she had been working on an article that focused on the museum label. We were both instantly focused. There is likely no aspect of museum convention more fraught then the tiny real estate given over to the label. Here, on a small bit of cardboard beside the original object, is a set of abbreviated choices that likely express far more about the current state of museological and art historical thinking than it reveals about the object it is appended to.

The Label Project
An original impetus for Smarthistory was to enrich the museum visitors’ experience. At the museum we too often see visitors focused on the scant data offered by the label and not the object, hungry for keys to the work of art in front of them. And too often we offer them only the merest sustenance, the basic stats of an artist’s birth and death, material, perplexing acquisition and provenance notations, and perhaps a brief formal reading or quote. How stingy this seems compared to the riches potentially available. Can the tired modernist fiction that the direct experience of the object must remain unencumbered by the frame of context really still be operative? Do we actually believe that the experience of seeing the objects that we display is so tentative, and so easily overwhelmed?

Our first project for the Smarthistory Lab will be a wiki for writing museum labels, framed by the aforementioned article (by Susan Chun) and a discussion on the museum label. Our questions: How can we reinvent the museum label? What should it include? Can it be digital and multi-layered so that summary can lead to in-depth resources if the visitor wants more? Could the wiki label project be a forum where scholars from museums and from universities collaborate to provide a multiplicity of voices that inform and challenge and can this be the point where the online museum intersects with the experience of the physical visitor?

Please look for the Smarthistory Lab initiative by the end of June.

– Beth Harris & Steven Zucker

Tyler Green in his Modern Art Notes blog, recently wrote two blog posts (here and here) about the Getty’s plan to put together a cross-institutional online collection catalogue:

Tyler’s post was also picked up on in the Smithsonian 2.0 blog.

Joan Weinstein, overseeing the project, noted that scholarly opinion and scholarship on any given work of art are constantly changing. What better environment for dealing with that than the web? But more importantly, what does it mean for museums and art historians to openly acknowledge that there are no final answers and that knowledge is developed through process? There are certainly ways the discipline has acknowledged that over the years, but the Collection Catalogue 2.0 seems like a big step forward in exposing processes, disagreements, and creating “conversations” around single works of art, instead of offering a monolithic expert voice (something like we’ve been doing with Smarthistory.org).

Coincidentally, yesterday in Twitter, a small conversation happened about Smarthistory.org that went like this:

And it brought home that what’s valuable about Smarthistory in terms of web resources for art history is not just our conversations, but that we bring together works of art from multiple institutions and places. And it’s true (and something we’ve talked about with Tina Olsen, Deb Howes, Nancy Proctor and others), that it’s so awful for educators to have to sort through the websites of so many different museums to look for good educational content — and this is made more difficult when museums are adding so much new material all the time. I mean, museums are making AMAZING multimedia educational content that teachers everywhere need to enrich what they can do in the classroom. I think it was Nancy who mentioned something about a new application that would scrape this content from the different sites and aggregate it. Boy do we need that.

Its interesting to think about these issues historically. In 1869, William Cullen Bryant delivered a keynote address to the Union League Club proposing the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, he positions the future museum as an strategic expression of New York’s ascendant economic and cultural power as well as a rampart against immigrants and those “dexterous in villainy.” He treats the museum as a territorial device supporting the aspirations of the city and the nation against the old orders of Europe. To a remarkable degree, American museums have largely continued to think in terms of territory and distinctions between those whose voices can be trusted and those whose voices are suspect.

In any case, Collection Catalogue 2.0 (so far: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian’s Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Walker, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA) is a great start!

But there’s more. Yesterday in a chat with colleague Chad Laird, he pointed out that it would be good if you knew that a museum’s website was the best source for the highest quality, largest image. Right now, after doing a google image search, educators often check the museum’s site, only to find that a better reproduction exists at the Web Gallery of Art, or a similar site. This points to the extraordinary disconnect in the discipline of art history between the academy and art museums. Between professors and curators. Of course there are specific arrangements and friendships that open doors in both directions but those from museums and universities often do not even attend the same conferences let alone work together to imagine the possibilities afforded by a distributed art history.

What is the museum now anyway? Sure, it’s still the physical place where we safeguard and see original works of art. But perhaps more importantly now, the museum is a distributed institution that can best maintain its authority and fulfill its educational mission by putting all that it has on the web and aggregating it with other institutions. So we can access — on the web — Collection Catalogue 2.0 — the museum of all museums — including the highest resolution images (in different sizes), different scholarly voices, conservation issues — everything. As Tyler discusses, museums are no longer worried that putting material on the web means fewer people will want to see it in person.

Imagine the opportunities…

Maybe this post should begin with the news that I started my new position as Director of Digital Learning at MoMA last week. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working at this great institution with such great colleagues.

And now the point of this blog post — we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! We’re always suckers for descriptions of the radically new and different face of education that is emerging. This pleasure was sharply contrasted with the disappointment that we felt when we read the much more widely discussed essay, “The Last Professor,” by Stanely Fish in last Sunday’s New York Times Op/Ed section. Here, Fish, writing as curmudgeon of the academy, nostalgically laments the death of an idealized humanities education of yore—an education he imagines nobly separated from practical application and that he sees defiled by for-profit institutions and the rise of a permanent adjunct class. He ends by smugly noting “…I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.” He is reacting to and lauding his former student Frank Donoghue’s new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” In his essay, Fish looks only to the past and seems to fear that all change leads to a for-proft, job-focused educational system.

Clearly, the humanities are changing and the university is being challenged to its core; but maybe what will be lost is its insular elitism. Had Fish had more vision, his essay might have noted that the humanities have never been more vibrant and that the very dim view he holds is largely because the cloistered walls of the University block the light. The continued vitality of the humanities is however very apparent to those whose wireless signals breach those walls to connect with and distribute knowledge in ways that are incredibly exciting and give us every reason to think that academic research and teaching are exactly where we want to be now.

Here is the definition of “digital humanities”:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

And here are our favorite parts of the manifesto:

Paragraph 11: Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.

Paragraph 13: Redefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.

We’ve written earlier about a new model of education where teachers are more accountable to students (no more boring lectures?). With Smarthistory, we’ve tried to be entertaining AND enlightening – using conversation as our tool. We’ve also tried to eschew an authoritative voice in favor of personal, opinionated voices. But we’ve also struggled with how to engage a broader public. We’ve “distributed” smarthistory to dipity, flickr, youtube and vimeo… and we’re working on Facebook now too (with Juliana Kreinik’s help).

This past week, we had two important lessons. I had a twitter account for months, but didn’t “tweet” much. But in the last couple of weeks, when I was home editing alot of videos, I twittered a few times about the videos I was posting on Smarthistory.org. Nothing happened at first, but several days later there was a small explosion of interest — due in part to a few twitterers, the Getty Museum, Shelley Mannion, and CJ, who spread the word around. It was wonderful — we had a twitter epiphany.

Then, the Museum of Modern Art twitterer, one brilliant Victor Samra in the Digital Media and Marketing departments twittered Smarthistory, and the “followers” came rolling in and so did the lovely comments about the site. I look forward to working a lot more with Victor, and with my colleagues in the Education department, and the Digital Media department as well.

The other revelation this week happened with Flickr (readers of our blog know we have been HUGE fans of using Flickr for teaching for years). Here’s Steven’s summary from the Smarthistory page:

One of our Flickr contributors sent me the following: “One point I noticed in the discussion is the location at which Van Gogh painted the potato eaters. In the dialogue it is said that he painted it in a coal mining area in Belgium near the French border. Whereas, received knowledge here in Nuenen is that he painted it in the time he lived here.”

He is absolutely correct. We listened to the podcast and we clearly make an incorrect statement. The Potato Eaters was painted in Nuenen when the artist lived there and we were (unclearly) referring to a period a few years prior when Van Gogh was Borinage. We had been thinking of the impact of the spiritual on his subject in this painting. We are so glad he offered this correction. It is one of the great strengths of social media like Flickr. Here is a great reminder that expertise is broadly distributed. I love our networked world!

The Liberal Arts at an end!? We hardly think so…

Now remember, we have been using Flickr to teach with for years, and yet — in the last couple of weeks — we’ve been amazed at the power of images from Flickr to enhance the content on the smarthistory site.

Here’s how:

1) The images can show the work of art in its current context. This is something we believe is critical & so very different from the sanitized images students usually see in art history class. Photos of images in context embed art in time and place — and give viewers a sense of what it is like to see and experience the original work.

2) The images can allow us to reflect more broadly on the social experience of seeing works of art in the museum.

3) The images can reveal details or views of the work that help to enrich our understanding and experience of it.

4) The images draw our attention to what viewers are finding interesting about a work of art and the museum experience.

5) The images create a community of interest among those who like to see new media being used in creative ways to make art and art history more accessible. Thanks Nels1!

6) It also means that we really begin to exploit the great potential of the read/write web, Smarthistory can become richer and stronger because of the collective wisdom of its visitors. This is especially compelling in the discipline of art history which too often discounts the knowledge of the non-expert. Here is a perfect example: Beth and I made an introductory video for the period 1848-1907 for Smarthistory that included Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. In the recording I got ahead of myself and made an error about where the artist was when he painted this wonderful canvas. Soon after we posted the video, I invited a photograph on Flickr to the Smarthistory group and linked it to the page with the video. The photographer, who is a resident of Nuenen, the city where the Potato Eaters was really painted, pointed out my error and I immediately posted the exchange/correction and recognized that we had really just touched on the the true power of social media. Knowledge is widespread and we finally have the means to bring it together. What could be a more exciting enterprise?!


– Beth & Steven

1) ARTstor Your institution must subscribe.
ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. As of January 2008, approximately 95% of ARTstor’s collections are available for download at 1024 pixels on the long side, while the remaining 5% may be downloaded at 400 pixels on the long side.
In addition, as part of the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) initiative, select images within ARTstor may be downloaded free-of-charge at very high resolutions for noncommercial use in scholarly publications.

2) NYPL Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

3) Wikimedia
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all. Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.

4) Flickr Commons
Search by tag.
The power of Flickr groups.
The power of the contextualized image.

IMAGE LIBRARY DATABASES WITH TEACHING TOOLS

1) Luna, Insight: A commercial solution
The Insight® Software Suite’s award winning features empower users to build, manage and share digital collections of any size. Unique to Insight is a rich toolset for working with images, text, audio and video files, PDFs, etc. Complete catalog data accompanies every image, allowing for quick and easy searches across one or many collections.

2) Almagest: Another open source solution — this one developed by Princeton.

3) MDID: An open source solution developed by James Madison University — the application we used for FITDIL (the FIT Digital Image Library)

1) JING
Jing works with Screencast – set up an account there to upload your videos and get links and embed codes.

Click here for Diane Arbus Video made with Jing

Here’s a Jing video embedded in a blog:

An example of an image captured and annotated with Jing:

2) SKITCH

Here’s an example of an image captured an annotated with Skitch:

3) Finetuna
Upload an image or grab a screenshot, annotate it, and email it. Also has a firefox plug-in.

4) Flickr annotations
Merode Altarpiece
Midterm Project
Image Collections

1) Flickr

Click here for an example of teaching with Flickr

Click here for another (more recent) example of teaching with Flickr

2) Voicethread

Click here to try it – click “Sign In or Register” (it’s very quick to set up an account)

Click here for an example of teacher-created content with Voicethread

Click here for another example — using Voicethread for teacher-created content

Click here for student-created content on Voicethread

3) Cozimo
With Cozimo you can collaborate and review images and videos — together in real-time or on your own time. Get feedback from clients and colleagues instantly. Cozimo is the faster, better, simpler way to work.

Cozimo also has a WordPress plugin — click here to see and try.

4) Conceptshare ConceptShare allows you to setup secure online workspaces for sharing designs, documents and video and invite others to review, comment and give contextual feedback anytime and anywhere without a meeting.

6) Thinkature
With Thinkature, you can create a collaborative workspace and invite coworkers, friends, and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards, and adding content from around the Internet. It’s all synchronous, too – no need to hit reload or get an editing lock.

1) Tag Galaxy

2) Oskope

3) picitup

4) PicLens

5) Imagery

6) Cyclops

1) Dipity (Timeline Creator)
Smarthistory in Dipity

2) Fotki – (photo-storage)
An example
Another example

3) Mead Map (concept mapping)

Eastman House
National Gallery of Art