Mercifully, and especially after our group dinner tonight, we have a short assignment tonght. What is my one thought from today? In our discussion about pedagogy and digital means this afternoon, some of the comments at my table–about student preparedness for college-level work, teacher-student engagement, effective methods of education–concern the state of higher education today in the U.S. Larger than the question of Digital Humanities are issues of class size, equitable allotment of resources campus-wide, goals of the art history survey class, and the quality of K-12 education.

During the last two years college freshmen and sophomores spent their entire public school careers under the “no child left behind” parameters. These students may be skilled at taking objective tests, but they are not well versed in the critical skills of analysis and expository writing which art history classes usually require. It is not really possible to remedy some of these deficiencies in one or two art history classes, especially considering the content-heavy nature of the survey classes. I do not wish to be pessimistic, but I am not really sure if Digital Humanities can remedy the situation.

However, in my survey classes I have transformed to active teaching and “flipping the classroom” techniques. Some Digital Humanities that I have used include:

excerpts from iTunes University lectures (Yale and Open University primarily) and TED talks
student critiques of MyArtsLab (online component of Stokstad and Cothren’s Art History text book)
annotated PowerPoints for class to watch/read before class in order to free up time for class discussion and team projects
student projects involving creating new components for MyArtsLab
team projects involving creating an iBook exhibit catalog (for an upper level class)
team projects involving Zotero anotated bibliographies (for an upper level class)
watching cartoons in class; I love cartoons! it is astounding that students pay attention to these but usually will text or snooze during films; subjects range from early animation, i.e. Gertie the Dinosaur and other Winsor McCay cartoons (coincides with comix and graphic novels); World War II propaganda cartoons (Walt Disney, Warner Brothers) and films (major Hollywood studios and directors) and German counterparts; current genre of graphic novel/memoirs transformed to cartoons (Persepolis, The Rabbi’s Cat)

And, Animoto offers endless possibilities for student productions and to create and post online capsules of history.

Students also enjoy this, Mason Williams’ Classical Gas from the Smothers Brothers Show, a (highly selective) survey of art in three minutes: http://vimeo.com/612081

Source: One Thought from Thursday

Wednesday’s readings sparked a memory of one of the finest articles that I have ever read about art museums, Kurt W. Forster’s “Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?” (New Literary History vol. 3 no. 3:459-470, Spring 1982). Forster, art historian and first director of the Getty Center, presents a compelling model for the museum as a cultural institution as a repository of all cultural material from a given time and place, because only in context can objects—including art—be understood. The article was written at a moment when both materialism and semiotics influenced art history and sadly the type of museum he advocates has not been realized. Natural history museums may approximate Forster’s ideal, but these European forerunners of modern anthropology museums tended to contain oddities and particular interests of their owners rather than encyclopedic collections. Would Forster’s prescribed museum be viable in a digital age?

Source: Thinking About Museums in the Digital Age…

Captions for Ancient Mayas & Space – Left: GIS reconstruction of site of La Milpa, Belize (Boston U); Center: 3D model of Castillo, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico; Right: detail of Pakal’s Sarcophagus Lid, Palenque, Mexico and artist’s (fanciful) reconstruction of Pakal piloting a spaceship.

How are these useful? GIS is very useful for reconstructing and analyzing what we can no longer see. It allows us to see the development of natural and urban spaces and to track patterns.

What about 3D models? Their creation can be labor intensive, and can allow a view of what once was. However, the creator must be absolutely certain that her/his information is accurate or else the result is faulty and misleading. Why do most 3D models spin? I don’t know, but they trivialize scholarship and tend to blur the lines between serious work and video games. (Creating games is serious work, but it is not academic work.)

Why do people still believe that ancient and non-western peoples were astronauts or ETs? Is it because many people think that they can read images without any training when in fact reading Maya art–or the visual culture of any society–is in fact a great investment of time and careful thought?

The spatial turn has affected my work even before I knew there was a term “the spatial turn.” I am concerned not by the flat space of a map or a plan but rather by the three-dimensional space that people inhabit. Key Thinkers on Space and Place (P. Hubbard and Rob Kitchin, eds., 2011, rev. ed., Sage) includes about 60 philosophers and practicioners. My own list includes philosophers, anthropologists, urban historians, and architects: Foucault, Benjamin, Heidegger, Deleuze, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Keith Basso, Barbara Bender, Edward Sosa, Dolores Hayden, Judith Butler, Tim Ingold, and Bernard Tschumi. Particular foci of my projects to understand and analyze spatiality, architecture, and ancient society include the “in-between,” “third spaces,” “phenomenology,” and ontology; other concerns are memory and landscape). In many cases I borrow modern concepts and adapt them to analyze the ancient world because, many times, those questions are more interesting to me, and more fundamental. Too, I approach architecture and space not as containers or stage sets for art and activity but instead as resources that people used–purposefully and not–that have the capacity to inform about intimate and broad filial, social, and cultural patterns.

This diagram that explains Yucatec Maya speech is a much more useful aid about space than the previous images. Yucatec Maya was and is spoken in and around Chichen Itza, the site of my project. It contains some fascinating features that English lacks regarding space and time. One is the expression of deicitic time; expressing sequential time is limited and instead cyclical time is emphasized. This is exemplified in gestures and speaking about completed and future actions. Although time and space are linked, they are not linear and a 3D project may be more relevant.

I have not found the ideal platform for my project yet. I would like to layer maps that relate information about geology, geography, astronomy, a restoration of part of the original site, and conceptual maps. The latter would supply vital ideas about the Maya world, including the ancestors and some deities who dwell below the surface of the earth, especially below ballcourts and cenotes or sinkholes; and some of the deities who dwell in the sky).

Google Maps would work if I could add more than three layers and tip the maps to a angle that would allow a 3D view. I was able to load the Omeka plugin. I am exploring some other software that promises to do what I want. But we live in a Late Capitalist world and have all heard that promise before.

To be continued…

Source: Blog about the ways that spatial humanities techniques might influence your scholarship

Data mining seems like a valuable source, especially for statistical analyses of text, for historiography, and for detecting patterns. It seems that the field as presently configured favors modern and contemporary projects, where sources are most likely to be in digital format. (The programs and strategies for dealing with digitized print sources that were in old fonts seem to be time consuming and fraught with problems.)

What are art historians who deal with older eras to do if they wish to include sources that are not in digital form? Some issues are:

We may have primary sources still in primary form, where paleography is still an issue, or sources that are not in digital form
In some cases we do not even have the requisite several hundred sources that would yield a corpus to analyze
If we have sources in more than one language, synonyms (not proper nouns) may have subtly different meanings that could skew results

However, I do see potential in using data mining to analyze student work, including exams, papers, and other written work. At some colleges there is an option for exams to be done in testing centers on computers and more colleges are moving toward tablets for all students to,use for reading and assigned work.Some possible data mining projects include:

Analyzing essay questions – if students were asked to discuss one (or more) art works, artists, or scholars, what are the proportions for who/what was mentioned? This could provide some insight into what sources students rely on (text book, outside reading, info mentioned in class) or what interests them.

Source: Thinking About Mining Data