Édouard Manet’s The Railway, oil on canvas, 1872-73 (National Gallery of Art)

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks

Courtesy Steffenz

A couple of years ago, Peter Samis (museum interpretor par excellence at SFMoMA) coined the term “visual velcro” to describe the goal of museum interpretation:

The work of interpretation…is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception. In fact, the more you know about a subject, the more you can learn about it (presuming the mental model you are working with accommodates the new information).

But in the last week or two I started wondering, just what is visual velcro? How do you identify it while you’re creating interpretive materials?

I found myself thinking about this question in the last week. I volunteered to do an “alternative” audio-guide for Barbara London’s upcoming exhibition, Looking at Music Side 2. Barbara organized three conversations — each with two artists in the exhibition. I recorded the audio and Barbara and I both prompted our guests with questions. But since this was my first time doing this, I had no structure to offer as “best practices” — so it was pretty free-form. Each conversation lasted about an hour. I thought they would be shorter, but when you get people talking and reminiscing (especially people who haven’t seen each other in a while), it’s hard to cut them off sooner than that, and anyway, their conversations were fun and enlightening.

I started editing last week. Needless to say, editing one hour down to 3 minutes is a lot of work, but what I found myself most aware of was the choices I was making about what to select and what to omit. In the first conversation we did, James Nares talked about his short film (made with Seth Tillett), Game, which shows a grid on the floor (tiles), and two sets of hands on either side — like players on opposite sides of a chess board — taking turns moving rocks back and forth repetitively across the grid. When Barbara told me about the film it seemed strange to me, what could this be about? and I immediately imagined my students saying “this is not about anything” and “this is boring” and “why is the artist being difficult?” Indeed, I found myself wondering what that kind of repetitive motion had to do with art in NYC in the 1970s.

During the conversation, James talked about Game, and explained that a significant aspect of the film for him was the rhythm that emerged from the placing of the rocks, and he talked about how a kind of raw music scene seemed to express the desperate feeling of living in a bankrupt New York City in the 1970s better than anything else. Ok, that helped a lot. That felt like velcro - historical context almost always does. But what felt MOST like visual velcro was when Colleen Fitzgibbon talked about how repetition was important in her work as well, and for other artists from the period too. And she explained that during that time there was a feeling of being bombarded with messages from broadcast media — much of which was delivering messages that seemed, well, just wrong in terms of politics.

And there was the velcro!

For me, the loop that attached was to something that was already on my mind - I had been thinking about the one way delivery of content that was the broadcast TV of my childhood compared with the two-way conversations that are possible with new media, with the read-write web (or even the choices that are possible in terms of media now, with rss, TiVo and fast forwarding and time shifting). When Colleen said what she did, I remembered how repetitive and monolithic broadcast media felt then. Suddenly I could put that repetition into the context of my own childhood - in the hours I spent watching reruns of I Love Lucy and other sitcoms, remembering how powerless I felt before the 7 or so channels there were to watch.

Courtesy Andy Connelly

So these are the sections that I kept in the audio. And I hope that they work as velcro for others, but what are the chances of that? Maybe other people’s velcro will be very different from what worked for me (though I feel like decades of teaching has made me attuned to what works for students). But I also wonder if this connection, the story that I tell in the audio, needs to be spelled out more explicitly? The audio now feels somewhat incomplete… we need a website, a place for hyperlinks and tags, a place where people can talk about what repetition meant to them in the 1970s, about what it was like to live in New York city at one of its lowest moments, about what it meant to be an artist then, about the special power music had at that moment in time, a place where we can expand the possibilities for velcro, so that there is something that attaches for everyone who comes to the exhibition. Peter Samis has written about these possibilities here.

Thanks to Barbara London for giving me this opportunity, and for her openness and collegiality, and thanks too, to Sara Bodinson and Nancy Proctor for their help and support in creating my first MoMA audioguide.

In this video, Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs, and Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator, talk about Useful Art #5: The Western Hotel, 1992 by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

WOW! Discovered at nearly midnight last night:

http://www.discoverpentimento.com/

I am so impressed - the interface is beautiful, and presents so many possibilities for interpretation. It’s offline. It’s free. Objects are available via themes, or an image gallery or item list. Audio, zooming… gorgeous!

WOW!

More later…

Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection.

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition.

So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews. We’ll make sure to post all results here, and plan to develop a related “How-To” section on the Smarthistory site this summer for museums that might want to replicate what we did, though it became very clear to us that having experienced facilitators from the outside was extremely valuable.

Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework”—articles by Rika Burnham (Frick Collection) and Peter Samis (SFMoMA). The homework focused on museum interpretation and included audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Over the course of the two days, each participant had four opportunities to create recordings in the galleries followed by time to listen, reflect and discuss. We experimented with different pairings—curator/curator, curator/educator, educator/educator, educator/docent, and docent/docent. In some pairings an object would be intimately familiar to one of the speakers, while in others, the object was less familiar to both. We also took turns in the mix.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much fun everyone would have. Taking time from busy schedules, going out into the galleries, talking to colleagues about beautiful and interesting objects that they feel a strong sense of attachment to, and creating and editing video that would live on the website—proved a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Several participants described the workshop as therapeutic and restorative.

In our discussions, we explored the following questions –

• Where should the media we created reside—on the website and/or in the galleries? How would it be accessed it the galleries?
• What formats (audio or video, long or short) would be best for those different settings?
• What style was best—an exploratory conversation or a relaxed interview? Is style tied to the purpose of the recording (a gallery overview, to model discovery, or an in-depth explication)?
• Does the conversation’s style depend on the speakers’ roles (docents, curators, educators—or a combination of those) and/or their familiarity and expertise with the object that was discussed?
• What visual material is most useful in the gallery versus on the website? Should visual material be offered in the gallery? If so, what kind of material would be best? Should we use a combination of photos of the image and video of the speakers?

We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. We were able to demonstrate strategies for creating engaging interpretive content as well as how to publish high quality video for in-gallery and web distribution. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants.

We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.

Please let us know if you have questions about the workshop, or if you are interested in running one at your institution.

Warm thanks to Christina Olsen, Bruce Guenther, Gerri Hayes, Kate Burns, Stephanie Parrish, Floyd Sklaver, Jillian Punska, Amy Gray, Maribeth Graybill, & Anna Strankman.

Ramesses II, Egypt, Herakleopolis
(Temple of Harsaphes), ca. 1250 BCE

Great Lyre from the “King’s Grave,” ca. 2650-2550 B.C., Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, bitumen and wood (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)

For some time now, we have been publicly questioning the division that exists between two professional groups tasked with educating the public about art: those in museums (curators and educators) and those in the academy (art historians). These two communities share expertise that is sought by the museum visitor and the student, yet they rarely meet, too often do not attend the same conferences, and almost never collaborate.

Teachers in the art history classroom regularly rely on museum resources (the fabulous Vermeer videos for example, created by the National Gallery, or the Eastman House videos to name two of our favorites). Exhibition subsites are also often very useful—but they are expensive to produce. The learning materials developed by professors for their students often reside behind the locked gates of learning management systems, so they are not available to the wider public (open courseware is, of course, the lovely exception). Interestingly, it is usually only via iTunesU that we are able to aggregate content created by these two different communities.

Our overarching point is that these two communities really ought to collaborate because the benefits to those we serve could be enormous. And we have two notions about how we might do that:

Notion 1
Inspired by Koven Smith’s recent paper (given just a couple of weeks ago at Museums and the Web) on the Future of Mobile Interpretation we thought of one way to bring the museum and the academy together. Koven draws attention to the disjunction between the more open and personalized online museum experience—which often allows visitors to browse most (if not all) of the museum’s collection, and even create personal collections of their own—and the experience of the on-site mobile device which contains only limited “stops” and focuses on special exhibitions and highlights from the permanent collection. Koven’s answer to mobile interpretation: make the entire collection available on mobile devices—with the textual accompaniment one finds on the website. And we would add more to that—make it available with interpretation that is conversational, open, personal, opinionated—AND offers expertise.

In a recent blog post Nina Simon noted the disjunction between the on-site experiences and the web experiences even of the same museum, “You may be able to engage a thriving community online, but if their experience with the institution is fundamentally different from the onsite one, they will remain online-only visitors.”

As we discussed with Nancy Proctor and Deb Howes, what if artists and art historians—those with significant expertise in looking at and thinking about art—could be called on to create multimedia (and even text-based) content for the works of art in a museum’s permanent collection? Museums could provide guidelines about what they are looking for, vet the content, and publish to the website and mobile devices only that content that aligned with the institution’s needs. In this way, the museum can begin to move toward becoming a platform and not just a provider.

Notion 2
The Smarthistory Lab
Susan Chun is one of those people for whom great ideas are a dime a dozen. There was one she tossed out over drinks recently that fit perfectly with two strands of thinking we have been grappling with at Smarthistory. On the one hand, we have sought ways to create a community of Smarthistory users and to include and highlight their voices (we are creating comments capability in the newest version) but we had also begun to discuss creating a sandbox, tentatively named the Smarthistory Lab, a neutral ground beyond the cloistered walls of the academy and the fortress-like facades of our museums where experts from across our disciplines can explore collaborative projects. So into this mire, Susan mentions that she had been working on an article that focused on the museum label. We were both instantly focused. There is likely no aspect of museum convention more fraught then the tiny real estate given over to the label. Here, on a small bit of cardboard beside the original object, is a set of abbreviated choices that likely express far more about the current state of museological and art historical thinking than it reveals about the object it is appended to.

The Label Project
An original impetus for Smarthistory was to enrich the museum visitors’ experience. At the museum we too often see visitors focused on the scant data offered by the label and not the object, hungry for keys to the work of art in front of them. And too often we offer them only the merest sustenance, the basic stats of an artist’s birth and death, material, perplexing acquisition and provenance notations, and perhaps a brief formal reading or quote. How stingy this seems compared to the riches potentially available. Can the tired modernist fiction that the direct experience of the object must remain unencumbered by the frame of context really still be operative? Do we actually believe that the experience of seeing the objects that we display is so tentative, and so easily overwhelmed?

Our first project for the Smarthistory Lab will be a wiki for writing museum labels, framed by the aforementioned article (by Susan Chun) and a discussion on the museum label. Our questions: How can we reinvent the museum label? What should it include? Can it be digital and multi-layered so that summary can lead to in-depth resources if the visitor wants more? Could the wiki label project be a forum where scholars from museums and from universities collaborate to provide a multiplicity of voices that inform and challenge and can this be the point where the online museum intersects with the experience of the physical visitor?

Please look for the Smarthistory Lab initiative by the end of June.

– Beth Harris & Steven Zucker

Unknown, Mixing Vessel with Odysseus Escaping from the Cyclops’s Cave, 550-500 B.C.E.

Speakers: Drs. Matthew A. Postal and Steven Zucker

Unknown sculptor, Venus after the Greek original by Praxiteles from the 4th century BCE,
Roman, 175 - 200 CE (Getty Villa)

Speakers: Drs. Beth Harris, Francesca Tronchin, Steven Zucker

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast In Bed, 1897 (Huntington Library).

Brooklyn is Watching is a breakthrough relational art project by Jay Van Buren that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery—Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar. In addition, there are two online forums for discussion, a blog which chronicles and comments on the work recently installed, and weekly podcasts where artists, art historians, gallerists and critics discuss the art and related issues.

Dekka Raymaker and Jay Newt

However, the most important aspects of Brooklyn is Watching are not found on the sim, in the gallery or within the critical discourses Van Buren enabled, but rather in the fraught relationships between the groups that inhabit these places. These interactions, or in certain cases, lack of interaction, starkly highlight the relative power of each group and their zones of influence. There are many distinctions within the art communities in Second Life, but there is a generally pervasive desire for art there to acquire the status accorded to “real” art and its attendant discourses, market, and press. This desire is made explicit and even exaggerated by the structures of Brooklyn is Watching which places artwork directly before a varied public, unmediated by gallery, curator or collector. Because all of the art has been placed on the sim within the past week, there is a heightened sense of immediacy. Clearly, artists who display their work on the Brooklyn is Watching sim explicitly seek critical attention. These tensions are implicit in the name—”Brooklyn is Watching.” It is also inscribed in its architecture, with its high watchtower and wide-eyed resident avatar.

The project enacts these antagonisms by offering artists the following instructions:
Welcome to Brooklyn is Watching. “Here” you will be able to be seen by visitors to Jack the Pelican Presents, an art gallery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Do something “here” and “you” will be watched, thought about and commented upon…whatever…leave “something” “here” and it will be chronicled on our blog and talked about on the Brooklyn is Watching podcast or…possibly…ignored…or possibly…mocked.

The heart of Brooklyn is Watching is this open invitation to artists to install (rez) their work on a sim, an uncurated space surrounded by water on all four sides. Artists and visitors find a flat astroturf-green field where art is scattered both at eye-level, below sea level, and often at altitudes well above the viewer. In the center of the sim sits an imposing tower. Its sole occupant is Monet Destiny, a large eyeball-shaped avatar (with additional protruding eyes), ironically sporting a trucker’s cap, his name a reference to Cezanne’s quip about the french Impressionist; “Monet is only an eye; but good God what an eye!” Over the course of the year, more than one hundred artists have left approximately four hundred works of art on the sim. This dynamic, uncurated exhibition space creates constantly changing relations between works of art that sometimes inter-relate or even intentionally intersect. Because so much of the art native to second life is concerned with defining space, the art itself shapes and reshapes the sim’s geography.

Brooklyn is Watching’s only physical installation is an alcove in the gallery Jack the Pelican Presents, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a magnet for new art outside of Manhattan. The installation consists of a couch, a coffee table, a computer, and a fifty-two inch monitor that continuously presents the avatar Monet’s view to gallery visitors. When Monet emerges from his watchtower, his motion and communication can be controlled by visitors, or if left to his own devices, he automatically shadows any avatar visiting the sim.

Brooklyn is Watching incorporates a blog and a weekly podcast. The blog allows individual contributors to chronicle and discuss specific works of art or broader issues and allows images and other materials to be sent via the “Tell us What to Watch” form. Posts regularly provoke or invite responses and this often leads to discussions between constituencies. In contrast, the weekly podcasts call on a core group of “regulars” (with rotating guests) that Van Buren assembles for compelling, no-holds-barred conversations about the meaning and quality of the most recent art installed on the sim. In this way, Van Buren relinquishes his authority replacing it with a salon-like discussion where meaning is constructed from the collision of multiple perspectives. Ideas are vetted and elaborated upon or summarily discarded, artists praised or dismissed.

By Jurria Yoshikawa

Second Life has increased the opportunity for non-experts to make art. As a user-created virtual world, Second Life has built-in tools that facilitate the act of creation. Every avatar is therefore a potential artist having the means of creation at her disposal. Like many other “web 2.0″ technologies, Second Life is both a platform and tool for content creation and just as the general public is invited to comment on the Brooklyn is Watching blog and non-experts participate in the podcasts, the spectrum of art makers in Second Life range from the theory-saavy Yale MFA to the amateur builder.

By Selavy Oh

Brooklyn is Watching seeks to witness and participate in the new broad wave of producers of culture that technology has empowered, producers with the potential to create more and more varied art than has ever been possible before (in contrast to the twentieth-century model of passive consumers of mass culture). Even the vocabulary that has arisen in Second Life is indicative of this shift away from an elite–in Second Life the word creator often replaces artist, and build is used instead of installation.

By Arahan Claveau

In part, Brooklyn is Watching asks the same question that Len Manovich asked in the last essay of “The Art of Participation,” an exhibition at SFMoMA, “can professional art survive the extreme democratization of media production and access?” When reformation Europe, aided by the printing press, realized that the Roman Church was not the sole path to God, the implications were enormous. Similarly, Brooklyn is Watching questions the apparatus and prejudices of the art market in the digital era and is perhaps the first Second Life project to explicitly focus on the juncture between real and virtual art practices and in doing so may point to critical issues that loom on the horizon.

DanCoyote Antonelli

Did we miss anything? Please let us know by leaving a comment.

Couldn’t we rethink this a bit?

The CAA annual conference has been enormously successful for many years, and this year is no exception. It brings a vast number of artists and art historians together, and clearly there is enormous value to be derived from that — the networking and employment opportunities, and the serendipitous meeting with new and old colleagues.

However, for the most part, the core of the conference – the Program Sessions — follow a model that has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century. Papers are prepared in advance, read, and if the session is well structured, there might be an active question and answer period afterward, perhaps with a discussant leading the way. It seems that for most sessions, the vast majority of time is taken up with the reading of carefully prepared papers with significantly less time allotted to either a discussant or active Q&A.

Maybe this needs some rethinking as a format? We were hoping we could begin to spark a discussion via this blog to solicit new models, perhaps some that might take advantage of new technologies? For example, what would happen if some papers were posted in advance in Commentpress – a format that allows for annotations on sections of text (this could be moderated, and open only to CAA members).Or, what about using Voicethread to extend conversations that began during a session? There may be numerous ways to employ technology to make our time together more valuable and to extend the session conversations beyond the sessions themselves.

The conversation about how best to do this might have taken place here on this blog, unfortunately at some point (and we just found this out), the comment function was intentionally disabled. This means that the format of this blog mirrors the principle format of the sessions themselves – something rather one-way, when it seems to us the point of us being is together is rather different…

Tyler Green in his Modern Art Notes blog, recently wrote two blog posts (here and here) about the Getty’s plan to put together a cross-institutional online collection catalogue:

Tyler’s post was also picked up on in the Smithsonian 2.0 blog.

Joan Weinstein, overseeing the project, noted that scholarly opinion and scholarship on any given work of art are constantly changing. What better environment for dealing with that than the web? But more importantly, what does it mean for museums and art historians to openly acknowledge that there are no final answers and that knowledge is developed through process? There are certainly ways the discipline has acknowledged that over the years, but the Collection Catalogue 2.0 seems like a big step forward in exposing processes, disagreements, and creating “conversations” around single works of art, instead of offering a monolithic expert voice (something like we’ve been doing with Smarthistory.org).

Coincidentally, yesterday in Twitter, a small conversation happened about Smarthistory.org that went like this:

And it brought home that what’s valuable about Smarthistory in terms of web resources for art history is not just our conversations, but that we bring together works of art from multiple institutions and places. And it’s true (and something we’ve talked about with Tina Olsen, Deb Howes, Nancy Proctor and others), that it’s so awful for educators to have to sort through the websites of so many different museums to look for good educational content — and this is made more difficult when museums are adding so much new material all the time. I mean, museums are making AMAZING multimedia educational content that teachers everywhere need to enrich what they can do in the classroom. I think it was Nancy who mentioned something about a new application that would scrape this content from the different sites and aggregate it. Boy do we need that.

Its interesting to think about these issues historically. In 1869, William Cullen Bryant delivered a keynote address to the Union League Club proposing the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, he positions the future museum as an strategic expression of New York’s ascendant economic and cultural power as well as a rampart against immigrants and those “dexterous in villainy.” He treats the museum as a territorial device supporting the aspirations of the city and the nation against the old orders of Europe. To a remarkable degree, American museums have largely continued to think in terms of territory and distinctions between those whose voices can be trusted and those whose voices are suspect.

In any case, Collection Catalogue 2.0 (so far: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian’s Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Walker, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA) is a great start!

But there’s more. Yesterday in a chat with colleague Chad Laird, he pointed out that it would be good if you knew that a museum’s website was the best source for the highest quality, largest image. Right now, after doing a google image search, educators often check the museum’s site, only to find that a better reproduction exists at the Web Gallery of Art, or a similar site. This points to the extraordinary disconnect in the discipline of art history between the academy and art museums. Between professors and curators. Of course there are specific arrangements and friendships that open doors in both directions but those from museums and universities often do not even attend the same conferences let alone work together to imagine the possibilities afforded by a distributed art history.

What is the museum now anyway? Sure, it’s still the physical place where we safeguard and see original works of art. But perhaps more importantly now, the museum is a distributed institution that can best maintain its authority and fulfill its educational mission by putting all that it has on the web and aggregating it with other institutions. So we can access — on the web — Collection Catalogue 2.0 — the museum of all museums — including the highest resolution images (in different sizes), different scholarly voices, conservation issues — everything. As Tyler discusses, museums are no longer worried that putting material on the web means fewer people will want to see it in person.

Imagine the opportunities…

Maybe this post should begin with the news that I started my new position as Director of Digital Learning at MoMA last week. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working at this great institution with such great colleagues.

And now the point of this blog post — we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! We’re always suckers for descriptions of the radically new and different face of education that is emerging. This pleasure was sharply contrasted with the disappointment that we felt when we read the much more widely discussed essay, “The Last Professor,” by Stanely Fish in last Sunday’s New York Times Op/Ed section. Here, Fish, writing as curmudgeon of the academy, nostalgically laments the death of an idealized humanities education of yore—an education he imagines nobly separated from practical application and that he sees defiled by for-profit institutions and the rise of a permanent adjunct class. He ends by smugly noting “…I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.” He is reacting to and lauding his former student Frank Donoghue’s new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” In his essay, Fish looks only to the past and seems to fear that all change leads to a for-proft, job-focused educational system.

Clearly, the humanities are changing and the university is being challenged to its core; but maybe what will be lost is its insular elitism. Had Fish had more vision, his essay might have noted that the humanities have never been more vibrant and that the very dim view he holds is largely because the cloistered walls of the University block the light. The continued vitality of the humanities is however very apparent to those whose wireless signals breach those walls to connect with and distribute knowledge in ways that are incredibly exciting and give us every reason to think that academic research and teaching are exactly where we want to be now.

Here is the definition of “digital humanities”:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

And here are our favorite parts of the manifesto:

Paragraph 11: Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.

Paragraph 13: Redefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.

We’ve written earlier about a new model of education where teachers are more accountable to students (no more boring lectures?). With Smarthistory, we’ve tried to be entertaining AND enlightening - using conversation as our tool. We’ve also tried to eschew an authoritative voice in favor of personal, opinionated voices. But we’ve also struggled with how to engage a broader public. We’ve “distributed” smarthistory to dipity, flickr, youtube and vimeo… and we’re working on Facebook now too (with Juliana Kreinik’s help).

This past week, we had two important lessons. I had a twitter account for months, but didn’t “tweet” much. But in the last couple of weeks, when I was home editing alot of videos, I twittered a few times about the videos I was posting on Smarthistory.org. Nothing happened at first, but several days later there was a small explosion of interest — due in part to a few twitterers, the Getty Museum, Shelley Mannion, and CJ, who spread the word around. It was wonderful — we had a twitter epiphany.

Then, the Museum of Modern Art twitterer, one brilliant Victor Samra in the Digital Media and Marketing departments twittered Smarthistory, and the “followers” came rolling in and so did the lovely comments about the site. I look forward to working a lot more with Victor, and with my colleagues in the Education department, and the Digital Media department as well.

The other revelation this week happened with Flickr (readers of our blog know we have been HUGE fans of using Flickr for teaching for years). Here’s Steven’s summary from the Smarthistory page:

One of our Flickr contributors sent me the following: “One point I noticed in the discussion is the location at which Van Gogh painted the potato eaters. In the dialogue it is said that he painted it in a coal mining area in Belgium near the French border. Whereas, received knowledge here in Nuenen is that he painted it in the time he lived here.”

He is absolutely correct. We listened to the podcast and we clearly make an incorrect statement. The Potato Eaters was painted in Nuenen when the artist lived there and we were (unclearly) referring to a period a few years prior when Van Gogh was Borinage. We had been thinking of the impact of the spiritual on his subject in this painting. We are so glad he offered this correction. It is one of the great strengths of social media like Flickr. Here is a great reminder that expertise is broadly distributed. I love our networked world!

The Liberal Arts at an end!? We hardly think so…

Now remember, we have been using Flickr to teach with for years, and yet — in the last couple of weeks — we’ve been amazed at the power of images from Flickr to enhance the content on the smarthistory site.

Here’s how:

1) The images can show the work of art in its current context. This is something we believe is critical & so very different from the sanitized images students usually see in art history class. Photos of images in context embed art in time and place — and give viewers a sense of what it is like to see and experience the original work.

2) The images can allow us to reflect more broadly on the social experience of seeing works of art in the museum.

3) The images can reveal details or views of the work that help to enrich our understanding and experience of it.

4) The images draw our attention to what viewers are finding interesting about a work of art and the museum experience.

5) The images create a community of interest among those who like to see new media being used in creative ways to make art and art history more accessible. Thanks Nels1!

6) It also means that we really begin to exploit the great potential of the read/write web, Smarthistory can become richer and stronger because of the collective wisdom of its visitors. This is especially compelling in the discipline of art history which too often discounts the knowledge of the non-expert. Here is a perfect example: Beth and I made an introductory video for the period 1848-1907 for Smarthistory that included Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. In the recording I got ahead of myself and made an error about where the artist was when he painted this wonderful canvas. Soon after we posted the video, I invited a photograph on Flickr to the Smarthistory group and linked it to the page with the video. The photographer, who is a resident of Nuenen, the city where the Potato Eaters was really painted, pointed out my error and I immediately posted the exchange/correction and recognized that we had really just touched on the the true power of social media. Knowledge is widespread and we finally have the means to bring it together. What could be a more exciting enterprise?!


– Beth & Steven

Works of art discussed:
Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring, oil on canvas, 1921 (MoMA)
René Magritte, The Human Condition, oil on canvas, 1933 (private collection)
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1943-44 (MoMA)

Works Discussed:
William Holman Hunt, Strayed Sheep (Our English Coasts), oil on canvas, 1852 (Tate Britain)
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, oil on canvas, 1873 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City)
Vincent Van Gogh, Potato Eaters, oil on canvas, 1885 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)