Art and Architectural History and the Performative, Mindful Practice of the Digital Humanities

Since the early days of the field, art and architectural historians have relied on image-based reproductions of our primary source material to do our work. And yet, Photography and digitization—the two main image-reproduction technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—do not duplicate their subjects uncritically. They have actively shaped our disciplines in sometimes overt, sometimes covert, ways. That said, photography and digitization are also different technologies from one another, and their use has been implemented fitfully and heterogeneously over time within the field. Art and architectural historians have thus not only become familiar with the process of embedding technologies into the humanities, we have also gathered hard-won, field-wide experience with the impact that their presence and obsolescence can have on our research processes over time. The story is not always one of success. We have often chosen to elide, ignore, or take for granted the ways that the socio-technical environments of these remediations have transformed the daily operations and rituals of our discipline. Because of this time-tested relationship, I wish to argue that art and architectural history offers the Digital Humanities approximately 115 years of experience with being attuned (or not attuned) to the impact of relying on technologically-mediated representations of the phenomenal world to perform humanities research. This type of scholarship, that is, one not directly reliant on primary sources but instead on remediations of those sources, is the fundamental, originary condition of the Digital Humanities.