“Distance and Criticality”: The Digital Humanities and the Potential for Art History Scholarship with Hubertus Kohle and Emily Pugh

Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Hubertus Kohle (professor of art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany) and Emily Pugh (an art historian and the Digital Humanities Specialist for The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles) on the relation between the digital humanities and the potential for art history. They reflect on how we work as scholars in terms of accessing and documenting archives and data, and the difference in scale between transferable computational methods as opposed to project-specific solutions. Both guests discuss how engagement with the digital might grant us distance to see our discipline anew, or reveal biases within the history of art, while also expressing some concern about a plateau in innovation, or a resistance in art history to collaborating with practitioners from adjacent fields who might open new directions within the digital. Throughout, the conversation circles around the question of how computational approaches may equip us to become more critical art historians.

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.