Digital Art History in 2021

Received: 12 April 2021 Revised: 19 May 2021 Accepted: 28 May 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12678 ARTICLE Digital art history in 2021 Alexander Brey Department of Art, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA Abstract The past decade has seen tremendous growth and innova- Correspondence Alexander Brey, Department of Art, Jewett Arts Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, 106 Central Street, Massachusetts 02481, USA. Email: alexander.brey@wellesley.edu tion in the use of digital resources, methods, and tools in the history of art and architecture. While digital art history is less developed than text-based disciplines, the emergence of new digital standards for visual and spatial data, and ad- [Correction added on 21 October 2021, after first online publication. The copyright line was changed] vances in computer vision are poised to revolutionize the field. This article provides a survey of recent developments in digital art history from the perspective of European and North American publications and conferences. I discuss the digitization of visual, spatial, and textual resources by museums, research centers, and individual researchers. Researchers have developed a variety of tools for digitally analyzing art and architecture, which can replicate or challenge traditional methods of formal, iconographic, and socio-historical analysis. Trends in published research indicate uneven growth in the theoretical sophistication of digital art history scholarship. While digital methods are quickly moving into the training of art history professionals and students, digital art history communities in museums, research institutes, and universities remain somewhat fragmented. I conclude with a reflection on critiques of digital art history, several of which have not been fully addressed in recent scholarship. 1 | INTRODUCTION This article discusses developments and debates in the field of digital art history following the publication of Johanna Drucker's groundbreaking article “Is there a ‘digital’ art history?” in 2013. A growing consensus has since emerged that This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2021 The Authors. History Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. History Compass. 2021;19:e12678. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12678 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hic3 1 of 14 BREY 2 of 14 indeed there is a digital art history, characterized by digital databases, tools, and techniques that allow art historians to analyze previously unimaginable volumes of images and texts, and produce analytically useful reconstructions of lost monuments and experiential contexts. Surveying English-language scholarship on the topic, this article focuses on resources, tools, and training for students doing digital art history, as well as recent publications that demonstrate the possibilities afforded by cutting-edge techniques. Recent advances in computer vision, in particular, have opened up new opportunities for analyzing the contents of images in addition to image metadata, even as they inspire critiques of digital approaches to art. Although the work of most art historians does not resemble Drucker's vision for a future in which art historians take “full advantage of computational capacities and techniques to ask questions of larger corpora” (Drucker, 2013), art history is at a point now where digital tools and infrastructure are so ubiquitous that scholars have begun to ask whether the phrase “digital art history” has become obsolete (Baca et al., 2019). Perhaps the phrase “experimental digital art history” more accurately reflects the material that is discussed in this article, which pushes the boundaries of existing technologies and disciplinary infrastructure, and raises questions about what kinds of knowledge art history can or should produce. The structure of this article is inspired by Paul Vierthaler's recent survey of digital scholarship in East Asian Studies in an attempt to foster interdisciplinary dialog, although some sections diverge from his organization to accommodate distinct disciplinary trends and conversations (Vierthaler, 2020). The first part of this article is devoted to ongoing efforts to digitize the evidence for arguments about art and architecture, as well as specialized databases and controlled vocabularies that allow for the computational analysis of digital proxies and their associated metadata. This section is followed by a survey of existing software and web-based tools for doing digital art history. Subsequent sections consider trends in digital art history research and publishing, the development of digital art history communities and opportunities for training, and critiques of digital art history. As a historian of art who researches the art and architecture of the medieval Middle East, I see at every turn the legacies of a disciplinary bias toward European and American painting, sculpture, and architecture that shapes which museums have resources to digitize their collections, which terms appear in controlled vocabularies, which images appear in databases, and which media are prioritized for digital analysis. Many of the museums and archives pioneering the digitization of sources and corpus building exhibit a deep commitment to preserving and making widely accessible objects in their stewardship, even as post-colonial critiques bring renewed attention to the ethics of collecting, displaying, preserving, categorizing, and most recently, digitizing cultural heritage. 2 2.1 | DATA AND INFRASTRUCTURE | Digitization and corpus building As they move from analog to digital formats and disparate physical repositories to unified online portals, photographic archives, museum collections, exhibition catalogs, dealer stockbooks, and traditional archives become valuable resources for art historians interested in using digital methods to study visual and material culture. Due to the varied spatial, visual, material, and textual media involved in art-historical research, the landscape of digitization and corpus building is considerably more fragmented than fields of digital scholarship focused primarily on texts. Bringing together representations of objects and monuments from around the world, image archives have traditionally been the scholarly hubs of art-historical research. Several of the largest photographic archives have digitized substantial portions of their holdings and explored tools to identify overlaps in their collections (Resig, 2014). These photographic archives include the Frick Photoarchive, the Villa i Tatti Fototeca, and the Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur, although all three are highly Eurocentric in their holdings. While individual institutions have traditionally employed distinct, sometimes idiosyncratic conventions for organizing cataloging information, members of the International Consortium of Photo Archives (PHAROS) recently decided to adopt the Linked Art standard for image meta- BREY 3 of 14 data (Delmas-Glass & Sanderson, 2020, p. 19). Smaller photographic archives focused on specific regions or media are increasingly common, such as the Manar al-Athar Project (University of Oxford, n.d.). Large, well-funded museums have advanced from online collections databases to new types of virtual exhibitions and tools for linking and exporting museum data. Not just stewards of physical objects, museums are also repositories for information about the provenance and exhibition of works, as well as sources of technical information about their production and use. By 2012, many large museums in Europe and North America had already produced public-facing digital databases of their collections online. Subsequent years have witnessed increased openness from institutions in terms of how images may be downloaded and used, the widespread adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), as well as a new emphasis on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow programmers and digital art historians to automatically select, filter, and export object records and images based on certain parameters. In 2011, technical specialists at the British Museum implemented a linked open data model that included an open license, non-proprietary formatting, and unique resource identifiers (URIs) for every object, actor, and location. Their pioneering adoption of a semantic framework for describing resources known as the CIDOC conceptual reference model continues to evolve.1 Their prototype demonstrated the challenges involved in producing resources and tools that meet the needs of diverse users ranging from museum professionals to students of art history (Oldman & Tanase, 2018, p. 327). To facilitate digital analysis of their collections data, the museum recently released a new version of their online collections database that allows users to export a comma-separated values file with object metadata directly from the results of an advanced search query. Exhibition catalogs, whether digitized or born digital, represent another distinct type of corpus for art historians. Individual museums are increasingly publishing catalogs of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions online (Causey, n.d.; Henel, 2017). Given the relative youth of art history as a discipline, copyright law poses a challenge to assembling reusable bodies of recent exhibition data. Still, historic archives of exhibition catalogs are increasingly available in digital formats, such as the Musée d'Orsay's searchable database of works and painters exhibited in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the French Salons (Base Salons, n.d.), or the exhibition data in Ars Electronica's Women in Media Arts database (Women in Media Arts, n.d.). Portals that bring together images and records from multiple institutional databases represent a new, digital phenomenon. Artstor was one of the earliest resources of this kind, aggregating digitized images with their associated metadata from museums and academic image libraries (Gregory, 2005; Rossetti, 2013). A more recent example is Europeana, which allows users to search digital records from thousands of European archives, libraries, and museums. Google Arts and Culture is also widely used for teaching, but a recent quantitative survey of works included there highlights its uneven distribution of regional and temporal coverage (Wani et al., 2019). More than a few students, misled by the corporate branding of the site, have failed to realize that institutions contribute images and metadata voluntarily. These portals suffer from a lack of standardized vocabularies, and constructing a comprehensive search query is as much an art as a science. Smaller research databases tailored to specific regions, periods, and fields appear every day, while established ones are constantly transforming. Many of these represent fairly literal translations of exhibitions or reference works into websites. In the field of Islamic Art, for example, the Museum With No Frontiers Discover Islamic Art portal features 2317 catalog entries for objects from 27 countries, organized into 18 exhibitions (Discover Islamic Art—Virtual Museum, n.d.). The Middle East Garden Traditions project at Dumbarton Oaks includes historical glossaries of key terms as well as catalog entries, plans, photographs, and bibliographic information for designed landscapes in majority Muslim regions from the eighth century to the present (Turker et al., 2014). Others have features and structures that more fully exploit their digital format. Archnet, a database of Islamic architectural monuments, directly incorporates digital copies of related publications, digitized videos of sites, and videos of 3D point-clouds (Archnet, n.d.)2 These developments are not unique to Islamic art. The Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture brings together images and publications for the study of early American material culture (‎Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, n.d.). Some of these projects are actively involved in producing new documentation, which is included alongside historic photographs and plans. Stephen Murray and Andrew Tallon's “Mapping Gothic France” BREY 4 of 14 remains an exemplar within the field, with laser scans, precision measurements, and high resolution, panoramic photographs of hundreds of monuments (Werwie, 2017). The project was cut short by grant funding and the death of a principal investigator, but it has provided invaluable documentation in the wake of the 2019 fire that destroyed the roof of Notre Dame de Paris. Specialized portals like Ukiyo-e.org, which aggregates and compares early modern Japanese prints held by institutions around the world, demonstrate how a single technologically savvy individual (in this case the javascript wizard John Resig) can produce targeted databases that revolutionize a field of study (Resig, 2017). Media-specific portals like Ukiyo-e.org and the virtual Hill Museum and Manuscript Library reading room (vHMML) offer important context for understanding works from diverse collections (Stewart, 2018). Other notable databases include the Musée d'Orsay's catalog of French polychrome sculpture (Sculptures Polychromes, n.d.), the Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM, n.d.), and the Digital Library of the Middle East (Digital Library of the Middle East, n.d.). Although many of these databases are free to consult, some are available only to those with subscriptions, such as the Index of Medieval Art (The Index of Medieval Art, n.d.). These databases require regular maintenance, and without robust institutional support they quickly break. At the time of writing, the Shahnama Project website is down for maintenance, while the Hispanic Baroque Art Database website returns a server error (Shahnama Project, n.d., The Baroque Art Project, n.d.). For researchers, the option to download their data as a functional archive of the corpus would be invaluable. Finally, a wide variety of museums have started using Google Street View or other interactive 360-degree panorama systems to allow users to tour their permanent collections and to document temporary exhibitions. This development, already underway prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been accelerated by museum closures and public health guidelines that limited capacity for visitors over the course of 2020 and early 2021 (Clerkin & Taylor, 2021, pp. 165–166). The proprietary technologies commonly used to produce and virtually navigate these tours pose a substantial digital preservation challenge for researchers and archivists. 2.2 | Biographical, geographical, and bibliographic databases and controlled vocabularies The Getty Research Institute oversees a group of core resources for doing digital art history, known collectively as the Getty Vocabularies (Harpring, 2010). These include the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Cultural Objects Name Authority, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and the Union List of Artist Names. These have received wide usage in anglophone digitization and cataloging projects, and have also been translated into several languages and expanded to include terms, names, and locations for non-western works (Nagel & Miller, 2013). There is also a group of catalogers and researchers committed to using Roelof Van Straten's ICONCLASS system, which has received new attention as a controlled vocabulary for digital projects (ICONCLASS, n.d.; Van Straten, 1986). Curators and researchers at the Victoria & Albert Museum have developed a similar controlled vocabulary known as the Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (Chinese Iconography Thesaurus, n.d.). A number of field-specific bibliographic databases exist, but the largest general bibliographic database for art history is currently the Getty Research Portal (Salomon, 2014). 3 | TOOL DEVELOPMENT Producing digital publications was an early focus of tool development in the digital humanities, and art historians have embraced several web-publishing tools that also have broad utility in other fields. Omeka, a platform for displaying museum and archive collections, allows users to create digital catalogs of images and their associated metadata, which can be queried and assembled into virtual galleries. Omeka provides art historians and their students with the means to create their own digital collections, serving as a kind of curatorial sandbox where new ideas for exhibitions can be BREY 5 of 14 prototyped and shared. Art historian Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank has argued that using Omeka prompts students to reflect on the human decisions that produce seemingly objective metadata about objects or monuments, and “consider how navigating their narrative online via a screen is different from reading a typed paper” (Kilroy-Ewbank, 2018). The Neatline add-on tools let users embed media from Omeka in maps and timelines, transforming it into a powerful tool for organizing and communicating art-historical transformations. For art historians who wish to produce digital publications that are text-focused, Scalar allows users to produce their own digital publications, emphasizing non-linear, multimedia-rich narratives. For historians of architecture and designed landscapes, 3D models, point-clouds from photogrammetry and laser scans, and 360-degree panoramas now complement plans, elevations, and photographs. The tools to produce and work with spatial data include graphical information systems, specialized software for performing spatial syntax analysis, laser scanners, and structure-from-motion photogrammetry (Bruzelius, 2017; depthmapX, n.d., Place Syntax Tool, n.d.; Jeffs, 2020; Krusche, 2018). Some are open-source and difficult to use, while professional tools for producing and sharing 3D models can be prohibitively expensive, and may vanish suddenly if a cloud-based service shuts down or a platform becomes obsolete. Still, tools like Google Tour Creator, Thinglink, and Sketchfab serve as a stopgap for displaying panoramas and 3D models until new standards and open-source alternatives tailored to the needs of art historians are developed.3 Technical art history has been one of the most promising areas of tool development in recent years, thanks largely to the work of engineers and computer scientists like C. Richard Johnson, Jr. Johnson and his collaborators have pioneered new methods for digital weave-matching (Johnson & Sethares, 2017), chain-line matching, and watermark matching (Gorske et al., 2020), which have the potential to revolutionize the study of works on canvas and works on paper. Their approach consists of shadowing museum professionals for extended periods of time (15 months in one case) to identify time consuming tasks that computers can do efficiently and quickly. The tools that they have produced are highly specialized in their functions, but potentially applicable to millions of works on canvas and paper. Tools for digitally locating and analyzing images in ways that are both meaningful to and usable by art historians lag far behind the text-based tools available to linguists, historians, and specialists in literature. ARIES, or ARt Image Exploration Space, is one of few such tools designed specifically for art historians (Crissaff et al., 2018; Deutch, 2021). ARIES effectively reproduces fundamental affordances of a lightbox, prioritizing close comparison of pairs of images, but takes advantage of features like relative scaling and sophisticated image overlays that are only possible in a digital medium. Other digital scholarship tools for working with images are less indebted to these disciplinary ways of looking. Lev Manovich's ImagePlot produces visualizations of image sets based on quantifiable attributes of digital images such as average brightness, hue, or saturation (ImagePlot, n.d.). As Drucker has pointed out, these features can be altered by different technologies of reproduction and digitization, so ImagePlot is best suited to analyzing digital images produced with the same camera and lighting conditions (Drucker & Bishop, 2019). Tropy, a digital image manager for researchers, targets scholars working with archival documents, but is also helpful for some historians of art (Tropy, n.d.). More sophisticated tools for computer vision require some knowledge of computer programming and familiarity with command-line interfaces, in which commands are entered in the form of lines of text. Tools for finding fairly precise visual matches are highly developed and accessible, and implementations like Ukiyo-e.org show how they can provide new insights into the study of prints by identifying reused or altered plates (Resig, 2017). Frameworks for exploring sets of digital images like VIKUS Viewer and PixPlot incorporate computer vision approaches, but they occupy a strange position in the ecosystem of digital art history tools: neither easy enough to customize to be useful for researchers who program, nor user-friendly enough to be useful for researchers who do not (PixPlot, n.d., VIKUS Viewer, n.d.). New projects like Damon Crockett's Iconographic Visualization in Python (Crockett, 2019), and Leonardo Impett's ImageGraph.cc, which provides a visual programming interface for image analysis (Impett, 2020), may soon help art historians use computer-vision-based workflows. A distinct set of highly developed tools also exists for automatic optical character recognition (OCR) of printed documents in most common languages, too numerous to list here. Automatic handwritten text recognition (HTR) has also reached the point where it is accessible to art historians BREY 6 of 14 working with extensive handwritten sources, provided they first produce some training data by manual transcription (Transkribus, 2020). Image archives like the Frick Art Library have been among the first art-historical institutions to develop tools that use computer vision. Early work in this area focused on identifying overlapping material from different archives (Resig, 2014). Recent efforts have produced highly reliable automatic classification of visual content (Han et al., 2021). Given their use of controlled vocabularies and their large corpus of existing training data, photographic archives, especially those focused on specific visual cultures and media, are well situated to take advantage of machine learning tools. Aggregators of works from multiple institutions like Ukiyo-e.org and Europeana face substantial challenges in reconciling data in multiple languages, although new approaches to standardizing idiosyncratic institutional metadata are in development (Li et al., 2020), as are new methods for harmonizing different controlled vocabularies that catalogers use to describe images (Marinescu et al., 2020). The dearth of accessible and affordable tools for working directly with 2D and 3D digitizations of objects and monuments has prompted art historians to adopt digital tools and methods that emphasize metadata. This approach dates back to the early statistical analyses of Jules Prown (1966), but is now widely accessible thanks to the availability of powerful and affordable computers and tools. Palladio, a kind of swiss-army knife for digital humanities visualization, produced by the Stanford Humanities + Design lab, is one popular tool for introducing students to the concept of visualizing relational metadata about objects and monuments (Honig, 2018). Software programs for formal network analysis (the quantitative modeling and analysis of links between entities) like Gephi, Cytoscape, and Visone, allow users to analyze and visualize data about artistic interactions, but lack the statistical rigor and epistemological pragmatism of sociological tools such as UCINET and RSiena. Tools for temporal network analysis, or the diachronic formation and dissolution of relationships within a network, offer a particularly exciting avenue of inquiry for future work in digital art history (Brey, 2018; M. D. Lincoln, 2020). Statistical programming languages and packages form the core of tools of many digital art history research projects, which I discuss in the following section. 4 | RESEARCH Bringing together information scientists, art historians, and museum professionals, The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History reflects the vibrant and varied discourses that have emerged within the field of digital art history (Brown, 2020). For anglophone readers, it serves as an excellent entry point into areas of ongoing investigation. In this brief overview of digital art history research, I emphasize the production of new art-historical knowledge, rather than proof-of-concept projects. While digital art history research can be approached through several different frameworks, I see four main conceptual approaches motivating the most exciting developments in digital art history. These four approaches are not mutually exclusive, and there is substantial overlap between several of them. First, scholars focused on reconstructing lost works, monuments, and experiential contexts have made remarkable use of 3D reconstructions, acoustic analysis, and other computational methods. These researchers go beyond the digital documentation or modeling of monuments and spaces, to formulate art-historical arguments that rest on structural or phenomenological insights gleaned from such resources. These approaches were pioneered in studies of ancient architecture, where interpretations of monuments rely heavily on careful digital reconstructions (Clarke, 2016; Favro, 2012; Sullivan & Snyder, 2017), but are increasingly also applied to standing structures. Andrew Tallon's “spatial archeology,” or close reading of structural deformations in buildings, demonstrated how laser scans of historic structures can support new interpretations of their construction chronology, arguing for the presence of flying buttresses in the initial design of Notre-Dame de Paris (Tallon, 2011). Other projects in this area parallel art history's disciplinary turn toward understanding vision alongside other sensorial experiences. Bissera Pentcheva has used acoustic modeling to understand how musical performances activated and responded to structures, reconstructing the soundscapes of Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine imperial church (Pentcheva, 2017). Three-D reconstructions of objects in their original BREY 7 of 14 contexts allow researchers to understand how works of art ranging from paintings to sundials were activated by daily and annual changes in natural illumination (Heath et al., 2018; Underhill, 2019). A second group of researchers has focused on distant reading of works, or the analysis of sets of objects and monuments that were previously too numerous to study as a group. Early examples of this approach, such as Cecil Striker's longue durée study of Byzantine church construction in Constantinople, relied on statistical analysis of databases (Striker et al., 2008). More recent studies adapt image analytics and computer vision tools to produce art-historical knowledge from digital images rather than metadata. Lev Manovich's work on the covers of popular magazines, the canon of European modern painting, and the visual culture of social media photography are pioneering in this respect, but they have proven controversial with both critics of and advocates for digital art history (Manovich, 2016, 2017). Franco Moretti and Leonardo Impett revisited Aby Warbug's work on gesture using computer vision and quantitative pose analysis to reveal the contours of a classicizing language of gestural expression (Moretti & Impett, 2017). Peter Bell and Impett use the same methodology to deconstruct the rigid iconographic and gestural taxonomies that historians of medieval art have produced through their analyses of Christian imagery (P. Bell & Impett, 2019). A third group of art historians is transforming social art history, using quantitative and computational methods like formal network analysis and regression analysis (a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between variables) to elucidate the social, economic, and political systems that prompted or facilitated the production of objects, buildings, and built landscapes. The historian of architecture Paul Jaskot has argued that digital methods allow art historians to reconstruct “the deep relationships between works of art, both banal and sophisticated, to the very workings of society itself” at scales that were previously unmanageable (Jaskot, 2019; see also Jaskot & Van der Graaff, 2017). One especially compelling case study in Diana Greenwald's Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art combines information from historic exhibition catalogs with complementary economic data to argue that the decreasing price of train tickets transformed French visual culture in ways that historians of art have not fully recognized (Greenwald, 2021). Network analysis has transformed our understanding of workshop interactions, whether in small-scale studies like Yael Rice's investigation of Mughal imperial manuscript workshops (Rice, 2017), or large-scale analyses like Matthew Lincoln's analysis of Dutch printmaking collaborations (M. Lincoln, 2016; M. D. Lincoln, 2017). The fourth approach to digital art history that I discern centers the digital analysis of textual archives and prosopography, which remains persistently under-represented in journals, special issues, and edited volumes dedicated to digital art history. These approaches, and the data they yield, are still central to producing contextualized historical understandings of works. Koenraad Brosens, a historian of early modern Dutch art and director of the Project Cornelia digital archive, has called this work “slow digital art history” (Brosens et al., 2019). Examples might include the digital critical edition of the French artist Élie-Honoré Montagny's Italian sketch album (Burlot & Denoyelle, 2015; Denoyelle et al., n.d.), the digitized archives of the Roman artists' association known as the Accademia di San Luca (Lukehart, n.d.), and the Digital Cicognara Library, an online library of the books owned by the early nineteenth-century Italian artist, collector, and art historian Count Leopoldo Cicognara (Hatheway et al., 2020). Publications based on these slow, archival digital projects may not be framed in terms of digital art history, indicating the extent to which certain digital tools and approaches are already naturalized within the discipline. 5 | JOURNALS AND REVIEWS Specialists in most fields of art history are most likely to find success publishing work based on quantitative and digital methods in journals focused on digital art history. Since 2012, the Artl@s Bulletin has published groundbreaking work with a focus on “quantitative methods and cartographic visualization,” showcasing scholarship that looks beyond European and American canons (Joyeux-Prunel, 2012, p. 10). The International Journal of Digital Art History has published a series of thematic issues on subjects ranging from digital space and architecture to how digital art history is transforming art institutions. A variety of other journals ranging from Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschicht, Visual Resources: An BREY 8 of 14 international journal on images and their uses, and The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy have dedicated special issues to digital art history debates, methods, and pedagogy. Historians of art are poorly represented in journals that publish broadly on digital and quantitative methods across fields, such as the Journal of Cultural Analytics, although several studies of modern and contemporary visual culture have appeared there (Fyfe & Ge, 2018; Tan et al., 2021). They are also largely absent from publications dominated by computer scientists and computational archaeologists, such as the Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. A few fields, most notably American art, already have exceptionally robust infrastructure for producing and publishing digital scholarship in widely read journals, whether digitally or in print. From 2012 to 2015 the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide published a set of six articles in their series “Digital Humanities and Art History.” The editorial board of the journal has commited to building digital art history literacies through subsequent initiatives. Beginning in 2018, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide began publishing a series of six digital art history articles as part of its “American Art History Digitally” series. Other journals in the field are following suit. Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art now has a dedicated digital art history editor, and its “Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History” initiative aims to publish three articles on “underrepresented or understudied constituencies in American art” between 2021 and 2023. In 2015, The Art Bulletin published its first digital supplement online (Ambrose, 2015). Other field-specific publications like the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art have recently developed guidelines and protocols for publishing digital art history projects (Submissions: Proposing a Digital Art History Project, 2017). The College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians have published guidelines for evaluation digital projects (Task Force to Develop Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Art and Architectural History for Promotion and Tenure, 2016), but scholarly reviews for digital projects and resources are still not as numerous as reviews of print publications. Notably, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and CAA.reviews publish reviews of multimedia or digital projects (Cranston, 2015; Millar Fisher, 2018; Um, 2016), as do a handful of other journals. 6 | DIGITAL ART HISTORY COMMUNITIES Art history research centers, universities, and informal meetups form the centers of several overlapping digital art history communities. The Getty Research Institute and the Getty Foundation are a focal point, sponsoring conferences and workshops at key digital humanities and art history centers at the University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; the University of Maryland at College Park; and Duke University. Since 2011, the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture at Duke University has served as a model for digital art history centers at other institutions. Over the past several years, the Frick Digital Art History Lab has hosted a robust lecture series on digital art history, including the “Searching Through Seeing: Optimizing Computer Vision Technology for the Arts,” a 2-day conference in 2018, as well as the four-part symposium “Technological Revolutions and Art History” in 2020 and 2021. The Terra Foundation for American Art is another center for digital art history, although its scope is restricted to Americanists. European hubs for digital art history communities include Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, which hosted the Coding Dürer hackathon in 2017, and the Universidad de Málaga, which cosponsors an annual summer school for digital art history with the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Oxford and Durham University organized the “Digital Approaches to Art History and Cultural Heritage” conference in the spring of 2021. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, informal meetup groups focused on Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) thrived in many larger cities throughout North America.4 While not exclusively focused on digital art history, these gatherings represented an important space where art historians learned about new digital tools and projects. BREY 7 | 9 of 14 TRAINING The development of new methods and tools for doing digital art history has surpassed training and adoption, but several programs and institutions have stepped in to bridge the gap. From 2013 to 2014, Anne Swartz and Michelle Millar Fisher organized a digital art history pre-conference in conjunction with the College Art Association's annual conference. They recognized that there was “little or no organized way for most art historians to gain skills, learn the vocabulary and languages” necessary to integrate digital methods into their work, and hoped that pre-conference workshops would create opportunities for sharing ideas and introducing new tools (Fisher & Swartz, 2014, p. 134). Formal training programs and opportunities have emerged, intended for graduate students, faculty and museum professionals, and most recently, undergraduate students. The Getty Foundation has funded a variety of introductory and advanced institutes aimed at students, faculty, and museum professionals (Digital Art History: Grants Awarded, n.d.). Several of these have released educational material including reading lists and tutorials (Posner et al., 2016). Since 2015, the University of Málaga and UC Berkeley have jointly run a Digital Art History Summer School in Málaga, Spain. The intensive, week-long course exposes participants with specializations ranging from information theory to the history of Flemish tapestries to a variety of digital methods and approaches (Ortega, 2018, p. 184).5 A number of universities now offer masters programs focused on digital approaches to art history and cultural heritage.6 Since at least 2019, undergraduate and graduate courses on digital humanities methods have been joined by classes focused on digital methods for art history and the study of visual and material culture.7 8 | CRITIQUES OF DIGITAL ART HISTORY Critiques of digital art history have centered on a few key issues and areas. Several critiques of digital methods in art history, and the digital humanities more generally, have focused on the limitations of methods based on quantifying or coding attributes of objects and monuments. Claire Bishop has characterized digital art history methods as the neoliberal “subordination of human activity to metric evaluation,” arguing that statistical methods are used, either intentionally or unintentionally, to sidestep challenges to the canon, debates about hermeneutics, and questions of historical causality (Bishop, 2018). Johanna Drucker responded by pointing out that modeling complex cultural phenomena numerically and categorically is in fact an interpretive act replete with theoretical implications (Drucker & Bishop, 2019). I would add that every discipline has a dynamic, internal equilibrium between the systematic collection or production of detailed information, the synthesis of granular observations, and the articulation of theoretical models and frameworks. One persistent topic of concern is the theoretical gap between “traditional” art history and digital art history. By operationalizing controversial concepts like “artistic influence,” proof-of-concept projects in computer vision have yielded equally controversial art-historical claims, which art historians have been quick to challenge (Pollock, 2014). Even projects rooted firmly within the discipline of art history exhibit a marked avoidance of more recent theoretical literature and scholarship. Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Dahlgren recently found that art historians who present and publish their work framed in terms of digital art history or digital humanities also tend to cite a distinct subset of art-historical literature: the pioneering formalism of Heinrich Wölfflin, the obsessive iconographic collections of Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, the stylistic sequences and series of Goerge Kubler, and the reflections on visual perception of Ernst Gombrich loom larger than they do in other fields of art history (Wasielewski & Dahlgren, 2021). Perhaps this is less a reflection of an outdated theoretical orientation than a sign that, in struggling to develop new theoretical frameworks, art historians using computational methods have found reasons to reuse and interrogate terms and concepts from the history of the discipline. Other scholars criticize the colonialist legacies that are being built into the very fabric of digital art history infrastructure. Hussein Keshani, a specialist in Islamic art, has argued that “uncritical digitization […] is potentially an act that recolonizes memory, even though the digitized archive increases accessibility” (Keshani, 2015). So-called vir- BREY 10 of 14 tual or digital repatriation is a subject of ongoing debate. Initially focused on anthropological collections (J. A. Bell et al., 2013; Ngata et al., 2012; Were, 2014), the concept has expanded to include digitization of all kinds of colonial collections (Schmidtke, 2018), digital aggregators or portals produced by and for source communities (Werla, 2019), as well as high-profile projects that make a digital argument for physical repatriation (Hickley, 2020). Drawing on models like the Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels), art historian Robert Wellington envisions a future in which institutions “preserve cultural concepts in local languages within [their metadata] vocabularies and ontologies to affirm the cultural sovereignty of the people who hold an historical stake in the shared artifacts of material culture” (Wellington, 2020). While they support data sharing between memory institutions and source communities, Robin Boast, former deputy director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and Jim Enote, director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni, New Mexico, point out that the phrase “virtual repatriation” elides the difference between objects and their data proxies, and argue that digital repatriation constitutes a neo-colonialist justification for “maintain[ing] the centralized, universal enlightenment collection” (Boast & Enote, 2013). 9 | CONCLUSION Art historians' embrace of digital images predates the move to partial or full remote instruction that many educational institutions made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet finding ourselves mediated through the same technologies as the objects we research, teach, and even curate has provided a new impetus for reflecting on the affordances and limitations of digital proxies. We would do well to heed the caution of art historian Alison Langmead: when working with digital media and tools, technological “affordances need to be kept in sight not only so they do not ossify but also so that they can continue to prompt us to do our best work” (Langmead, 2018). While practitioners of digital art history are making great strides, this brief overview reflects the persistent North Atlantic biases of the institutions, collections, and archives on the cutting edge of anglophone digital art history, as well as the cultural and theoretical challenges facing the field. ACKNOWL EDGMENTS I wish to thank the organizers of and participants in the Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History, in particular Dr. Maeve Doyle, for generously sharing their perspectives on digital art history with me. ORCID Alexander Brey https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3201-8462 ENDNOTES 1 CIDOC is the abbreviation for the French title of the International Committee for Documentation (Comité International pour la Documentation) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). 2 See, for example, the 3D point-cloud flyover of the Bab al-Barqiyya in Cairo provided by CyArk, https://archnet.org/ sites/6389/media_contents/87722 (accessed May 19, 2021). 3 See, for example, the annotated 3D models uploaded to Sketchfab by students in Karen Mathews's classes: https://sketchfab.com/umiamiarh (accessed May 19, 2021). 4 Meetup.com remains a popular site for organizing such meetups, whether in-person or online. Interested readers can search for “digital humanities” along with the name of their city or region. 5 The application guidelines and program for the most recent iteration are available at http://historiadelartemalaga.uma.es/ dahss20/ (accessed May 19, 2021). 6 Duke University has offered an MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media since 2014, Pratt Institute offers a Master of Science in Museums and Digital Culture, Université de Tours has an MA in Digitization in Culture and Heritage, University BREY 11 of 14 of York offers an MSc in Digital Heritage, and Johns Hopkins offers an MA in Cultural Heritage Management and Certificate in Digital Curation, to name just a few. 7 Such classes were offered by Jennifer Bauer at UNC at Chapel Hill in 2016 and 2019, Sarah Laursen at Middlebury College in 2018 and 2020, Christopher Sawula at Emory University in 2019 and 2021, Nancy Um at Binghamton University, SUNY in 2020, Yael Rice at Amherst College in 2021, and Glaire Anderson at the University of Edinburgh in 2021. REFERENCES Ambrose, K. (2015). Editor's note: Digital art history. The Art Bulletin, 97(3), 245–245. Archnet. (n.d.). Archnet: Built Environment of Muslim Societies. https://archnet.org/ Baca, M., Helmreich, A., & Gill, M. (2019). Digital art history. Visual Resources, 35(1–2), 1–5. Base Salons. (n.d.). Salons et expositions de groupes, 1673-1914. http://salons.musee-orsay.fr/ Bell, J. A., Christen, K., & Turin, M. (2013). After the return. Museum Worlds, 1(1), 195–203. Bell, P., & Impett, L. (2019). Ikonographie und Interaktion. Computergestützte Analyse von Posen in Bildern der Heilsgeschichte. Das Mittelalter, 24(1), 31–53. Bishop, C. (2018). Against digital art history. International Journal for Digital Art History, 3, 123–131. https://doi.org/10.11588/ dah.2018.3.49915 Boast, R., & Enote, J. (2013). Virtual repatriation: It is neither virtual nor repatriation. In P. F. Biehl & C. Prescott (Eds.), Heritage in the context of globalization (pp. 103–113). Springer. Brey, A. (2018). Temporal network analysis with R. Programming Historian, 7. https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0080 Brosens, K., Aerts, J., Alen, K., Beerens, R. J., Cardoso, B., De Prekel, I., Ivanova, A., Lamqaddam, H., Molenberghs, G., Slegten, A., Truyen, F., Van der Stighelen, K., & Verbert, K. (2019). Slow digital art history in action: Project Cornelia's computational approach to seventeenth-century flemish creative communities. Visual Resources, 35(1–2), 105–124. Brown, K. (Ed.). (2020). The Routledge companion to digital humanities and art history. Routledge. Bruzelius, C. (2017). Digital technologies and new evidence in architectural history. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76(4), 436–439. Burlot, D., & Denoyelle, M. (2015). “Digital Montagny”: An introspective experience in art history. Getty Research Journal, 7, 125–132. BVMM. (n.d.). Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux. https://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/ Causey, F. (n.d.). Ancient carved ambers in the J. Paul Getty museum. https://ambers.netlify.app/ Chinese Iconography Thesaurus. (n.d.). Chinese Iconography Thesaurus. V&A, Brill. https://chineseiconography.org/ Clarke, J. R. (2016). 3D model, linked database, and born-digital E-book: An ideal approach to archaeological research and publication. In S. Münster, M. Pfarr-Harfst, P. Kuroczyński, & M. Ioannides (Eds.), 3D research challenges in cultural heritage II (pp. 136–145). Springer. Clerkin, C. C., & Taylor, B. L. (2021). Online encounters with museum antiquities. American Journal of Archaeology, 125(1), 165–175. Cranston, J. (2015). What Jane saw. CAA.reviews. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2580 Crissaff, L., Wood Ruby, L., Deutch, S., DuBois, R. L., Fekete, J.-D., Freire, J., & Silva, C. (2018). ARIES: Enabling visual exploration and organization of art image collections. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 38(1), 91–108. Crockett, D. (2019). Ivpy: Iconographic visualization inside computational notebooks. International Journal for Digital Art History, 4, 3.60–63.79. https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2019.4.66401 Delmas-Glass, E., & Sanderson, R. (2020). Fostering a community of PHAROS scholars through the adoption of open standards. Art Libraries Journal, Cambridge, 45(1), 19–23. Denoyelle, M., Burlot, D., & Baca, M., & Élie-Honoré Montagny's Recueil d'Antiquités. (n.d.). A digital critical edition. INHA. https://digitalmontagny.inha.fr/en depthmapX. (n.d.). depthmapX: Multi-platform spatial network analysis software. https://archtech.gr/ Deutch, S. (2021). ARt Image Exploration Space (ARIES): A response to the image needs of art library patrons. Art Libraries Journal, 46(1), 7–12. Digital Art History: Grants Awarded. (n.d.). The Getty Foundation. https://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/dah/ dah_grants_awarded.html Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture. (n.d.)‎ . UW-Madison Libraries. https://search.library.wisc.edu/ digital/ADLDecArts Digital Library of the Middle East. (n.d.). Digital Library of the Middle East. https://dlmenetwork.org/library Discover Islamic Art—Virtual Museum. (n.d.). Museum With No Frontiers: Discover Islamic Art. http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/ Drucker, J. (2013). Is there a “Digital” art history? Visual Resources, 29(1–2), 5–13. Drucker, J., & Bishop, C. (2019). A conversation on digital art history. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the digital humanities 2019. University of Minnesota. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2019 12 of 14 BREY Favro, D. (2012). Digital immersive reconstructions of historical environments. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 71(3), 273–277. Fisher, M. M., & Swartz, A. (2014). Why digital art history? Visual Resources, 30(2), 125–137. Fyfe, P., & Ge, Q. (2018). Image analytics and the nineteenth-century illustrated newspaper. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.026 Gorske, S., Johnson, C., Sethares, W., Ellis, M., & Messier, P. (2020). Moldmate identification in pre-19th-century European paper using quantitative analysis of watermarks, chain line intervals, and laid line density. International Journal for Digital Art History, 5, 6.14–16.35. Greenwald, D. (2021). Painting by numbers: Data-driven histories of nineteenth-century art. Princeton University Press. Gregory, T. R. (2005). RR 2005/430: ARTstor. Reference Reviews, 19(8), 47–48. Han, X. Y., Papyan, V., & McQuaid, J. (2021). AI and the digital photoarchive. Digital approaches to art history and cultural heritage. University of Oxford and Durham University. Harpring, P. (2010). Development of the Getty Vocabularies: AAT, TGN, ULAN, and CONA. Art documentation. Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 29(1), 67–72. Hatheway, H., Lawson, R., & Oertel, C. (2020). The Digital Cicognara Library: Transforming a 19th century resource for the digital age. Art Libraries Journal, 45(2), 47–54. Heath, S., Herschman, R., & Roughan, C. (2018). Animated shadows on virtual stone: Ancient sundials in a gallery setting. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 12. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/4836-2/ Henel, J. E. (2017). New approaches to old art: The launch of NGA online editions’ Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Visual Arts Research, 43(1), 8–16. Hickley, C. (2020, June 8). Digital Benin: A milestone on the long, slow journey to restitution. The Art Newspaper. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/news/digital-benin-a-milestone-on-the-long-slow-journey-to-restitution Honig, E. A. (2018). Teaching renaissance workshop practice as network analysis. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 12. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/teaching-renaissance-workshop-practice-as-network-analysis/ ICONCLASS. (n.d.). ICONCLASS. http://www.iconclass.org/ ImagePlot. (n.d.). ImagePlot visualization software: explore patterns in large image collections. http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/ imageplot.html Impett, L. (2020, November 20). ImageGraph: A visual programming language for the visual digital humanities. DHnord2020. dhnord2020—the measurement of images. Computational approaches in the history and theory of the arts, Lille. https:// www.meshs.fr/page/imagegraph_553 Jaskot, P. B. (2019). Digital art history as the social history of art: Towards the disciplinary relevance of digital methods. Visual Resources, 35(1–2), 21–33. Jaskot, P. B., & Van der Graaff, I. (2017). Historical journals as digital sources: Mapping architecture in Germany, 1914–24. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76(4), 483–505. Jeffs, A. (2020). Digital 3D modeling for the history of art. In K. Brown (Ed.), The Routledge companion to digital humanities and art history (pp. 313–325). Routledge. Johnson, C. R., Jr., & Sethares, W. A. (Eds.). (2017). Counting Vermeer: Using weave maps to study Vermeer's canvases. RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. https://countingvermeer.rkdstudies.nl/counting-vermeer-using-weavemaps-to-study-vermeers-canvases/ Joyeux-Prunel, B. (2012). ARTL@S: A spatial and trans-national art history. Origins and positions of a research program. Artl@s Bulletin, 1(1), 1. Keshani, H. (2015, December 10). Digitizing islamic world visual cultural heritage: Recolonizing or decolonizing cultural memory, or both? Hypotheses. https://patmagh.hypotheses.org/262 Kilroy-Ewbank, L. G. (2018). Doing digital art history in a pre-Columbian art survey Class: Creating an Omeka exhibition around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 12. https://jitp.commons. gc.cuny.edu/doing-digital-art-history-in-a-pre-columbian-art-survey-class-creating-an-omeka-exhibition-around-themixtec-codex-zouche-nuttall/ Krusche, K. (2018). 3D Documentation and Visualization of the Forum Romanum. In M. Ioannides, E. Fink, R. Brumana, P. Patias, A. Doulamis, J. Martins, & M. Wallace (Eds.), Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2018 (pp. 281–300). Springer. Langmead, A. (2018). Art and architectural history and the performative, mindful practice of the digital humanities. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 12. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/art-and-architecturalhistory-and-the-performative-mindful-practice-of-the-digital-humanities/ Li, K., Batjargal, B., Maeda, A., & Akama, R. (2020). Artwork information embedding framework for multi-source Ukiyo-e record retrieval. Digital Libraries at Times of Massive Societal Transition, 255–261. Lincoln, M. (2016). Social network centralization dynamics in print production in the low countries, 1550-1750. International Journal for Digital Art History, 2. https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2016.2.25337 BREY 13 of 14 Lincoln, M. D. (2017). Continuity and disruption in European networks of print production, 1550-1750. Artl@s Bulletin, 6(3), 23–40. Lincoln, M. D. (2020). Tangled metaphors: Network thinking and network analysis in the history of art. In K. Brown (Ed.), The Routledge companion to digital humanities and art history (pp. 73–87). Routledge. Lukehart, P. (n.d.) The history of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma. National Gallery of Art. https://www.nga.gov/accademia/en/intro.html Manovich, L. (2016). Instagram and the contemporary image. http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-andcontemporary-image Manovich, L. (2017). Cultural data: Possibilities and limitations of working with historical data. In O. Grau, W. Coones, & V. Rühse (Eds.), Museum and archive on the move: Changing cultural institutions in the digital era (pp. 259–276). De Gruyter. Marinescu, M.-C., Reshetnikov, A., & López, J. M. (2020). Improving object detection in paintings based on time contexts. 2020 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 926–932. IEEE. Millar Fisher, M. (2018). SmartHistory.org. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3248 Moretti, F., & Impett, L. (Sep/Oct 2017). Totentanz: Operationalizing Aby Warburg's Pathosformeln. New Left Review, 107. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii107/articles/franco-moretti-leonardo-impett-totentanz Nagel, L., & Miller, C. (2013). The Tesauro de Arte & Arquitectura and Tesauro regional patrimonial: Tools for describing and enhancing access to Latin American cultural resources online. Getty Research Journal, 5, 149–156. Ngata, W., Ngata-Gibson, H., & Salmond, A. (2012). Te Ataakura: Digital taonga and cultural innovation. Journal of Material Culture, 17(3), 229–244. Oldman, D., & Tanase, D. (2018). Reshaping the knowledge graph by connecting researchers, data and practices in ResearchSpace. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2018, 325–340. Ortega, N. R. (2018). Summer school on digital art history (DAHSS). Data-driven analysis and digital narratives. International Journal for Digital Art History, 3. https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2018.3.49917 Pentcheva, B. V. (2017). Hagia Sophia: Sound, space, and spirit in Byzantium. https://hagiasophia.stanford.edu/ PixPlot. (n.d.). Yale DH Lab Projects: PixPlot. https://dhlab.yale.edu/projects/pixplot/ Place Syntax Tool. (n.d.). Spatial Morphology Group: Place Syntax Tool. https://www.smog.chalmers.se/pst Pollock, G. (2014, August 22). Computers can find similarities between paintings – but art history is about so much more. http://theconversation.com/computers-can-find-similarities-between-paintings-but-art-history-is-about-so-much-more-30752 Posner, M., Drucker, J., Presner, T., Nelson, S., & Albrezzi, F. (2016). Digital art history 101: A basic guide to digital art history. https://ucla-beyond-slide-library.github.io/DAH101/About.html Prown, J. D. (1966). John Singleton Copley. Harvard University Press. Resig, J. (2014). Using computer vision to increase the research potential of Photo archives. Journal of Digital Humanities, 3(2). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/using-computer-vision-to-increase-the-research-potential-of-photo-archives-by-john-resig/ Resig, J. (2017). An ukiyo-e database for everyone. Impressions, 38, 148–151. Rice, Y. (2017). Workshop as network: A case study from Mughal South Asia. Artl@s Bulletin, 6(3), 50–65. Rossetti, A. (2013). Subject access and ARTstor: Preliminary research and recommendations for the development of an expert tagging program. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 32(2), 284–300. Salomon, K. (2014). Facilitating art-historical research in the digital age: The getty research portal. Getty Research Journal, 6, 137–141. Schmidtke, S. (2018). The zaydi manuscript tradition: Virtual repatriation of cultural heritage. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50(1), 124–128. Sculptures Polychromes. (n.d.). Répertoire des sculptures polychromes dans les collections publiques françaises, 1848-1916. https:// sculptures-polychromes.musee-orsay.fr/ Shahnama Project. (n.d.). The Shahnama Project. http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/ Stewart, C. (2018). Giving voice to ancient texts: Manuscript scholarship in the digital era. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50(1), 119–123. Striker, C. L., Russell, J. M., & Russell, J. C. (2008). Quantitative indications about church building in Constantinople, 325-1453 A.D. Architectura, 38, 1–12. Submissions: Proposing a Digital Art History Project. (2017, April 11). Journal of the historians of Netherlandish art. https://jhna. org/submissions/#digital-art-history-project Sullivan, E. A., & Snyder, L. M. (2017). Digital Karnak: An experiment in publication and peer review of interactive, three-dimensional content. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76(4), 464–482. Tallon, A. (2011). Rethinking medieval structure. In R. O. Bork, W. W. Clark, & A. McGehee (Eds.), New approaches to medieval architecture (pp. 209–217). Ashgate. Tan, K., Munster, A., & Mackenzie, A. (2021). Images of the arXiv: Reconfiguring large scientific image datasets. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 3. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.21374 14 of 14 BREY Task Force to Develop Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Art and Architectural History for Promotion and Tenure. (2016). Guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in art and architectural history. College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians. https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/evaluating-digital-scholarship-in-art-and-architectural-history.pdf The Baroque Art Project. (n.d.). A data collection of Hispanic Baroque painters and paintings from 1550 to 1850. Cultureplex. http://www.cultureplex.ca/project/the-baroque-art-project-at-your-service/ The Index of Medieval Art. (n.d.). The Index of Medieval Art. https://theindex.princeton.edu/ Transkribus. (2020). READ Co-op: Transkribus. https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ Tropy (n.d.). Tropy: Research Photo Management. https://tropy.org/ Turker, D., Shopov, A., Wilson, L., Stockstill, A., & Chahanovich, S. (2014, September 25) Middle East garden Traditions. https:// www.doaks.org/resources/middle-east-garden-traditions Um, N. (2016). Going global in Mughal India. CAA.reviews. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2805 Underhill, J. (2019). The twilight of presence: Pictorialized illumination in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. Leonardo, 52(1), 44–53. University of Oxford. (n.d.). Manar Al-Athar. http://www.manar-al-athar.ox.ac.uk/ Van Straten, R. (1986). Panofsky and ICONCLASS. Artibus et Historiae, 7(13), 165–181. Vierthaler, P. (2020). Digital humanities and East Asian studies in 2020. History Compass, 18(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/ hic3.12628 VIKUS Viewer (n.d.). Explore cultural collections along time, texture and themes. https://vikusviewer.fh-potsdam.de/ Wani, S. A., Ali, A., & Ganaie, S. A. (2019). The digitally preserved old-aged art, culture and artists: An exploration of Google Arts and Culture. PSU Research Review, 39, 88. Wasielewski, A., & Dahlgren, A. (2021, March 4–5). New datasets, old mindsets. Quantifying and contextualizing digital approaches in art history. Digital approaches to art history and cultural heritage. University of Oxford and Durham University. Wellington, R. (2020). Metadata, material culture, and global art history. In K. Brown (Ed.), The Routledge companion to digital humanities and art history (pp. 326–337). Routledge. Were, G. (2014). Digital heritage, knowledge networks, and source communities: Understanding digital objects in a Melanesian society. Museum Anthropology, 37(2), 133–143. Werla, M. (2019). Qatar digital library as a platform for digital repatriation of Qatar's cultural heritage. Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge. TPDL 2019 (pp. 406–409). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30760-8_44 Werwie, K. (2017). Stephen Murray and Andrew Tallon, 2012. Mapping Gothic France. Digital Medievalist, 10. https://doi. org/10.16995/dm.54. http://mappinggothic.org/ Women in Media Arts. (n.d.). Ars Electronica: Women in Media Arts. https://archive.aec.at/womeninmediaarts/ AU T H OR BIOGR APH Y Alexander Brey (Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College 2018) is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College. His research focuses on the cross-cultural adaptation of images and ideas in early Islamic visual cultures, and digital methods for art history. Alexander has worked on archaeological excavations in Jordan and Israel, and received fellowships from the Dumbarton Oaks program in Garden and Landscape Studies, the American Center of Research in Amman, and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. His current research project, tentatively titled The Caliph's Prey: Hunting in the Visual Cultures of the Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE), analyzes depictions of hunting and constructed landscapes for hunting. Looking at monuments in the capitals, provinces, and frontiers of the Umayyad caliphate, it reconstructs the cultural and imperial associations of different types of hunting imagery, as well as the rhetorical frameworks that guided patrons and craftsmen in the reuse and adaption of hunting imagery for new political contexts. How to cite this article: Brey, A. (2021). Digital art history in 2021. History Compass, 19(8), e12678. https:// doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12678