Call for Applicants

Middlebury College, Middlebury VT
August 3-15, 2014

Middlebury College is pleased to invite applications for Fellows to participate in the first Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History (August 3-15, 2014), generously sponsored by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Co-directed by Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University) and Anne Kelly Knowles (Middlebury College), the Summer Institute will emphasize how digital mapping of art historical evidence can open up new veins of research in art history as a whole. All art historians of any rank (including graduate students, curators, or independent scholars) with a scholarly problem related to spatial evidence or questions are encouraged to apply.

Whether talking about the spreading influence of Rembrandt’s workshop, Haussmann’s Plan of Paris, the Roman Forum, the caves of Dunhuang, the views of Edo, the market for Impressionist painting, the looting of assets by Napoleon, the movement of craftsmen over the medieval pilgrimage road, or the current proliferation of art expos globally, art history is peppered with spaces, both real and imagined. As such, spatial questions are central to many art historical problems, and visualizing spatial questions of different physical and temporal scales is an intellectual and technical problem amenable to the digital environment. Building the capacity to think spatially in geographic terms will carry an art historian a long way towards developing sophisticated questions and answers by exploiting the digital environment.

At the end of the two-week period, Fellows will have a grounding in the intellectual and historiographic issues central to digital humanities, basic understanding of the conceptual nature of data and the use of a database, an exposure to important examples of digital art history in the field, and a more in-depth study of one particular digital approach (GIS and the visualization of space). Graduating Fellows will have the vocabulary and intellectual foundation to participate in on-going digital humanities debates or other specialized digital humanities workshops while also gaining important practical and conceptual knowledge in mapping that they can begin to apply to as scholars and teachers.

Given this focus, our Institute will be ideal for those art historians who already have identified a spatial problem in their work. Note, though, that no prior knowledge or experience in digital humanities will be necessary or assumed for the application process. Naturally, general  awareness of the scholarly potential of the digital environment or mapping will be a plus. All geographies, time periods, and subareas of art history will be considered.

For more information on the application process, see:
http://las.depaul.edu/haa/docs/fulltime/Digital_Mapping_flyer.pdf

For questions, please contact at any time the co-directors Paul B. Jaskot, pjaskot@depaul.edu; Anne Kelly Knowles,
aknowles@middlebury.edu

All materials must be sent electronically by March 3, 2014.

Source: http://www.kressfoundation.org/news/Article.aspx?id=35544&blogid=132