Summary

Over the past decade humanities researchers have increasingly come to embrace digital methods. Art historians, however, have often resisted engaging with these developments. In this article, we explore the driving factors behind art history's reticence toward the digital turn in the humanities. Reflecting on the historiographic trajectory of the emerging field of digital art history (DAH) versus art history more generally, we selected a sample of recent articles published between 2010-2019. We used a mixture of methods, both digital and non-digital, to uncover the prevalence for different art-historical theories in DAH versus mainstream art history. We began our study by performing a text mining analysis on the references and bibliography of articles published in DAH, Art Journal, and Art History. Once we had determined a list of frequently-cited authors, we dug deeper to see how they were discussed in the body of individual texts. In other words, we employed traditional humanities methods: close reading and interpretation. DAH is typically positioned as something completely new to the discipline. However, as this study shows, DAH is closely tied to particular pre-digital methods and theories of art history, namely formalist and iconographic methods prevalent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, rather than critical theory methods commonly found in more recent art-historical scholarship. Based on our analysis, we argue that DAH methods have not been embraced by art historians more generally because of fundamental differences in the theoretical underpinnings of DAH versus the broader field of art history.

概括

在过去十年中，人文研究人员越来越多地接受数字方法。然而，艺术史学家经常拒绝参与这些发展。在本文中，我们探讨了艺术史对人文学科数字化转向保持沉默的驱动因素。为了更广泛地反映数字艺术史 (DAH) 新兴领域与艺术史的史学轨迹，我们选择了 2010 年至 2019 年间发表的近期文章样本。我们混合使用数字和非数字方法来揭示 DAH 与主流艺术史中不同艺术史理论的流行情况。我们通过对 DAH、Art Journal和Art History 上发表的文章的参考文献和书目进行文本挖掘分析来开始我们的研究。一旦我们确定了一个经常被引用的作者名单，我们就会深入挖掘，看看他们是如何在个别文本的正文中讨论的。换句话说，我们采用了传统的人文方法：仔细阅读和解释。DAH 通常被定位为该学科的全新事物。然而，正如这项研究表明的那样，DAH 与特定的前数字方法和艺术史理论密切相关，即 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初流行的形式主义和图像学方法，而不是最近艺术中常见的批判理论方法- 历史奖学金。根据我们的分析，我们认为 DAH 方法并未被艺术史学家更普遍地接受，因为 DAH 的理论基础与更广泛的艺术史领域存在根本差异。