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The culture of museums differs from the culture at universities in terms of their missions and interests in dealing with collection data. While museums manage the collections in databases, provide online access to the artifacts or offer mediation applications, academics focus on the content-related, research-based examination of collection data. Scholars in art history and digital humanities increasingly participate in a digital knowledge culture in which viewing images of artworks from a database and reading accompanying information on a public interface proves unsatisfactory. Times have changed and data itself has become a desired research subject. When museums, art history, and the digital humanities increasingly recognize each other’s different cultures and how they are affected by the digital transformation, this prepares the ground for a sustainable exchange of knowledge in the digital realm as well. Currently, the cultural knowledge that could emerge from insights gained through the analysis of digital images and metadata from art collections is at risk of being stuck unreachable in databases. This paper explores the conditions under which knowledge is constituted based on digital technology by providing a comprehensive overview of the most up-to-date developments in the field of museums and in digital art history. Part of the theoretical argument is to identify what the stumbling blocks to an efficient, promising, and future-oriented use of collection data are, but also to critically address limitations of technology-driven art historical research.
The aim of this meta-study is to situate the fundamentals of digital art history and digital museum collections within technological discourses in the digital humanities. Digital collections of art museums and their conditions are the starting point for interrogating the application of digital humanities methods for art historical research. Art history in the digital age means going beyond recreating the traditional methods and approaches in a digital environment. Nevertheless, there are also technological implications that set limits to the effectiveness of a digital art history. A condensed synthesis of technological developments, based on a comprehensive survey of literature, in the domain of museums, art history and digital humanities culminates in a thorough discussion of digital determinants of art historical knowledge. In the following, collection data and its implications for knowledge are considered first from a museum perspective, then from an art historical perspective, to finally arrive at what knowledge is under digital conditions and what the current problems are.
Museums have a long-standing expertise in meaning-making with objects (Hooper-Greenhill 2000). Even if exhibitions still dominate museum knowledge production, pressing questions about what changes for museums (Giannini / Bowen 2019) and their objects (Niewerth 2018) under the conditions of digital technology are discussed. Moreover digital collections, databases and applications offer new possibilities for digital representation and mediation of art (Wiencek 2019). Applications that use collection data are still rare due to the challenges of missing organizational structures, personal skills and financial resources that would enable museums to develop convincing digital applications (Glinka 2018). Nonetheless, numerous promising projects propose visualizations as interfaces and to explore collections interactively (Glinka et al. 2017; Windhager et al. 2019), whether through timelines (Kräutli 2016; Vane 2019) or interactive exploration of high dimensional data in 3D-visualizations (Kenderdine et al. 2013). Interactive visualizations provide alternative and attractive insights for users in contrast to common collection interfaces and serve in art history and the digital humanities as means for gaining new insights (Glinka / Dörk 2018). For knowledge to emerge from visualizations, this requires that museums competently use technology for their purposes and that the data is available in machine-readable form for research projects at universities. A museological, art historical and technological view on data must be possible. Digital transformation means for museums far more than just digitizing collections, but includes profound organizational changes with new responsibilities and forms of collaboration (Pöllmann / Herrmann 2019). Digital collections are situated in an ecosystem of collection’s digitization, access, research with data and the creation of custom applications (Andraschke / Wagner 2020) with an underlying interest in semantic networks based on metadata standards (Matschinegg et al. 2019).
Fundamental volumes have been published in digital art history (Kuroczyński et al. 2018; Brown 2020) which show the broad spectrum of digital methods that can be applied to art historical data. Research in digital art history consists of two main strands: applying digital humanities methods and creating or using tools (Dressen 2017). A digital literate art history asks rather for the conditions of the digital image (Kohle 2013) and analysis possibilities from a technological perspective (Reyes-Garcia 2017) than to study artworks by viewing the image content as in classical art historical research. Applied technologies and methods include computer vision, machine learning, and neural networks for searches by image based similarity (Bell / Ommer 2018; di Lenardo / Kaplan 2017), creating sophisticated 3D-models of historical architecture, reconstructions and simulations with semantically enriched levels of information (Hoppe et al. 2020; Kuroczynski et al. 2019; Messemer 2020; Underhill 2019) and research in digital environments (Crissaff et al. 2018; Schneider 2019). The aim is to gain new insights with completely different approaches and research questions that ground on technological preconditions. Interpretation in digital art history is dependent from quantitative and qualitative methods, but a set of assumptions that influences the interpretation is also inherent in every dataset or tool (Sebastián Lozano 2017: 3). Quantitative methods that become part of digital art history should not be seen uncritically (Bishop 2017). Applying digital technology to art historical content requires a consistent research question that is not trivial from the perspective of art history. Art history with its visual focus poses specific challenges within the digital humanities (Drucker 2013), but scholarship is equally characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration (Berg-Fulton et al. 2018; Zorich 2012) as in the digital humanities in general (Antonijević 2015).
As we have seen, knowledge constitutes itself also in digital environments, which is only successful without trying to imitate the physical world (Eigenbrodt / Stang 2014: 3). What should be strived for is a culture of open science in the sense of free access and exchange of knowledge (Reichmann 2017) between museums, art history and digital humanities nourished by digital technology. The still quite separated and diverse cultures should be broken up in favor of a common knowledge culture that is oriented towards the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) and Open Data Policies (like the one by Rijksmuseum). Giving adequately access to knowledge in the digital age means mainly: 1) for museums to make the collection data available for free use (Zorich 2013) in machine-readable form; 2) for art history and the digital humanities to publish possibly open access (Effinger 2018) and data driven (Schelbert 2017) as well as to use and publish open source tools. Regarding digital collections, both the museum perspective on data as well as the scholarly perspective from art history and digital humanities are necessary. Knowledge – formerly published in print in exhibition catalogues and academic publications – should nowadays be made available in digital form. Otherwise, today’s knowledge is willingly reduced to older traditions of doing research in art history as well as presenting, communicating and mediating art from museum collections. An advanced use of digital technology, digital humanities approaches, and staff with appropriate skills in the museums and in art history contribute to the digital knowledge society.
Art historical knowledge production results to a large extent from the symbiosis of museums exhibiting art and publishing exhibition catalogues and the theorization of art in art history. The challenge is to move this essential relationship into the digital realm and enable access to data, today’s preferred, adequate form of access to information. Even if discussions of digital technology are present in all fields, a flow of knowledge determined by digital conditions is by no means guaranteed nowadays. Not only in the digital age, the life cycle of knowledge consists of creating, storing, processing, sharing, using and researching (Eibl et al. 2006). In digital terms, this life cycle of knowledge is interrupted at several stages in museums, art history and digital humanities for different reasons and with different impacts. With regards to the museums that typically provide access to online collections by offering to search for artworks and display the records, the cycle for the digital dissemination of knowledge stops at sharing. This is fatal for art historians with an interest in digital methods and digital humanists whose work starts at this point. Museums need to be conscious of other perspectives on data that arise from the digitization of collections as well as a growing use of digital technology in scholarship which increases the demand to reuse that data. Only then, computer-based image analysis and visualization become possible for the interpretation and new insights into image collections. Since digital technology has entered the humanities, and thus art history, not having access to art historical data prevents applying and contributing to digital humanities tools and methods with the consequence of not being able to participate in cutting-edge digital humanities research.