Research (Current)
Application Systems and Infrastructures for Research in Art History
In order to develop application systems for art historical research, it is necessary to look at the complete software stack. This project examines the opportunities of using computers for the subject of art history, with a focus on data analysis and graphical user interfaces for the evaluation of image data.
This is the core of the book project I am currently working on.
The image shows a user interface developed by Cedar LakeVentures, Inc.
Research Infrastructure (Since 2018)
European Digital Art History Network
The future development of Digital Art History faces greater challenges than one single project or even one single country can tackle. Thus, after an initial meeting with fourteen European representatives from nine countries in Munich in late August 2018, we are developing the network for Digital Art History.
This network was initiated and developed in collaboration with Marieke Hendriksen.
Research Infrastructure & Digital Publishing (Since 2015)
International Journal for Digital Art History
The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) is a young and successful peer-reviewed journal for digital art history. With over 20,000 pdf downloads per year, it rivals established journals. Its success is based on academic excellence paired with methodological innovation and a global scholarship framework. Enjoy and join our community of art historians, information scientists, and media artists:
The journal seeks to gather current developments in the field of Digital Art History worldwide and to foster discourse on the subject both from Art History and Information Science. The Digital Age has revolutionized the economy, society and our private lives. For decades now, digitalization has also touched most branches of the humanities. With the rising importance of the so-called Digital Humanities, Art History is at the brink of new ways of accessing its material and gaining unprecedented insights.
Together with Liska Surkemper, I am the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal. We lead an international team of editors and are proud to be based on three continents.
Online Conference (2020)
Art History in Quarantine: Digital Transformations, Digital Futures
In the age of shelter-in-place, digital literacy is no longer optional. In just a few weeks, we have seen an unprecedented infrastructural shift to video conferencing, online pedagogy, and project management software. What presents itself as a challenge to everyday art history is also digital art history’s greatest opportunity—for experimentation, learning, and moving forward, together. With this in mind, we hope to pose a number of pressing questions to our global community: What does a civilization in “social distancing” mean for art history, museums, teaching, and infrastructure? What are the challenges right now? What are the opportunities today? What proven tools are available? What can we expect from the future? Physical separation need not warrant intellectual isolation. Be part of the global exchange.
The conference Art History in Quarantine: Digital Transformations, Digital Futures was held April 10, 2020. With an international audience of about 300 people from over 30 countries it has been a huge success with enormous reverberations on social media. You can read reports about the event here and here. Due to popular demand, videos of all presentations are now available.
Research (Current)
Linked Data for British and American Art
When Thomas Jefferson drafted the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, he laid the foundation for the political sovereignty of the later United States. Culturally, however, it had to assert itself against the dominance of Europe for decades before an independent American art could emerge. Under the leadership of the painters John Trumbull and Samuel Morse, a generation of artists tried to establish European art theory and the history painting associated with it in the USA. This initiated a process of rethinking that led to an increasing detachment from Europe and laid the basis for modernity.
Works and actors in time and space can be represented as a network and on this basis "art stories" can be told, which embed the individual work in its context and make the history of ideas understandable using art objects. This project brings together qualitative and quantitative research, builds on a graph database developed in-house on American art around 1800 and develops it further.
Innovative Teaching Methods (Since 2016)
Digital Art History Summer School
The Digital Art History Summer School (DAHSS), organized by Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega at the University of Málaga, has a triple objective:
To investigate the possibilities of computational analysis strategies and digital methodologies for the understanding of cultural objects and processes, especially those related to artistic and visual culture.
To establish a training environment based on creation, research and innovation from collaborative projects.
To build an international community around this new field of research, in which cultural analysis, computational languages, artificial intelligence and the digital medium converge.
I have been an instructor at DAHSS since 2015. My contribution has been leading teams to develop skills in data science, create a tweet bot and get used to cloud computing.
Innovative Teaching Methods (2017)
Hackathon Coding Dürer
The subject of art history is in the middle of a “digital turn”. Using the computer for research in art history is only possible in interdisciplinary collaboration - this time with IT.
As a result, on 13-17 March 2017 organized an international hackathon for art history and computer science: Coding Dürer. 50 art historians, computer scientists and data designers from 15 different countries came together for 5 days with open art historical data, such as the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum, but also to creatively come up with exciting new solutions with data from Europeana and Wikidata. Big data was sensibly evaluated for art history, implemented in visualizations and pioneering applications developed.
This event was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation and took place on the premises of HubertBurda Media in Munich.
Aufbau DFG Schwerpunktprogramm (2016-18)
Das Digitale Bild
Das von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) geförderte Schwerpunktprogramm (SPP) „Das digitale Bild“ führt aus multiperspektivischer Sicht exemplarische Projekte zusammen und thematisiert dabei die zentrale Rolle, die das Bild im komplexen Prozess der Digitalisierung von Wissen in Theorie und Praxis spielt.
Die Initiative für das Projekt ging als Antragstext 2017 bei der DFG ein. Beteiligt im Programmausschuss waren Hubertus Kohle, Hubert Locher, Harald Klinke, Björn Ommer und Heidrun Stein-Kecks. Die Bewilligung erfolgte im März 2018 durch ein Gutachtergremium. Im April 2018 erfolgte die Einladung für Antragsteller der ersten dreijährigen Förderperiode des Programmes durch eine offizielle Ausschreibung der DFG.
Research (since 2019)
Cultural Tweetbots
Museums are subject to an extensive transformation in which they have to redefine their tasks under the auspices of digitization, social media and virtual reality. The publication of the collection data as open data unleashes new possibilities for bringing the cultural artefacts into new, contemporary contexts. Open collections data are brought together with the global public through the visual medium of Twitter. For example, the Tweetbot @cart_fun_facts builds on the Open Data strategy of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Tweetbot @thyssenmlgbot tweets the works of the Carmen Thyssen Museum Málaga with the help of NLP techniques.
Application & Teaching (2016-18)
App development for art historians
The aim of the Meet4Muse project was to work together in independent groups on an interdisciplinary basis and to launch an app. How it is possible with this app to encourage a younger audience to visit more museums and thus to embark on new ways of communicating culture, you can find out in the presentation.
Research (2013-14)
Immersive User Interface
A display that allows objects to appear spatially and interact with them - without any 3D glasses or other peripherals, directly and intuitively. Such an innovative quasi-holographic user interface is designed in this project and implemented with a touch screen, head tracking and 3D graphics.
The principles of this basic research that was developed in cooperation with Volkswagen AG Wolfsburg can be used in the context of human-machine interfaces (HMI) in presentations, in design, in logistics planning, in driver assistance systems or in consumer electronics. The advantage lies in the creation of a spatial impression and the ability to manipulate objects without the need for additional peripherals.
In the publication, programming is discussed in detail, application scenarios will be discussed and the importance of such applications for the future of visual media will be discussed. This book describes the goals and development of a graphical user interface that creates a 3D space that can be explored through the spatial movement of the viewer and manipulated with touch input. Head tracking using Microsoft Kinect and touch input using Microsoft PixelSense are used.