Celebrating 10+ Years of Wired!: 2009-2021

Celebrating 10+ Years of Wired!: 2009-2021

Contents

- Introduction

- History

- A New Model

- Research

- Objects

- Spaces & Systems

- Scale

- Current Projects

- Initiatives & Outreach

- Past Projects

- Teaching

- Collaborative Teaching

- Curriculum

- An Exemplary Course

- PhD Students

- MA Students

- Workshops and Institutes

- DH at Duke

- Future Directions

- About

- Dedication

- Acknowledgments

- Funding & Sponsorships

- Contributors

Introduction

- Paul B. Jaskot

We are pleased to present this volume as both a celebration of over ten fantastic years of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture at Duke University and as an introduction to our new name and forward-thinking position within the Digital Humanities: Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. Wired! began in 2009 with the concept of vertically integrating digital methods of research in Art History and Visual Culture within all levels of pedagogy. Starting with student training—from first-year seminars, independent research, and senior theses for distinction on up to the professional and academic training of graduate students—our faculty and staff embed curricular strategies for mentoring students within the development of students’ own rigorous research. As our previous mission, re-drafted in 2017, stated:

“Wired! is a learning community of faculty, staff, and students. We engage visualization methods to prompt new approaches to pedagogy and scholarship in the study and interpretation of the visual arts, architecture, cultural heritage, and built environments.”

Such an ambitious mission was enacted from its inception through the significant work and commitment of faculty and staff. This work prospered originally under the indefatigable leadership and vision of Caroline Bruzelius, Anne Murnick Cogan Distinguished Professor Emerita of Art and Art History, the founding Director of the Wired! Lab. We owe much to her creativity, her energy, and her vision for combining cultural research and pedagogy with digital methods at Wired!, and I am pleased to thank her here for this extraordinary work and service.

Caroline Bruzelius teaches students in the 2012 Museums Inside & Out course at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Image Credit: Nasher Staff

Since our five-year anniversary, we have expanded in ambition and scope.

Our work, we believe, has made a real impact not only on hundreds of Duke students but also on the broader study of Art History and Visual Culture as well as on the practice of the Digital Humanities. This influence has centered on rigorous research questions and agendas, and we have chosen to highlight the expansion of this agenda in our new name: the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.

Logo for the Duke Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. Design Credit: Jack Edinger

This name recognizes the forward-thinking impulse of the Wired! Lab from the beginning as well as the increasingly collaborative vision that unites our research efforts. Our projects have focused on many cultural and digital topics, but they have especially explored three principal approaches to Art History and Visual Culture: the investigation of the object, the interpretation of cultural spaces and systems, and the critical engagement with various scales of analysis. While our faculty, staff, and students are engaged with many other questions, the clustering of projects around these broad thematic areas generates not only energy within our various individual topics but also an intellectual synergy among them.

This led to the establishment of a new mission statement in 2020:

Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab is a dynamic research community of faculty, staff, and students. We engage and advance critical digital methods to promote new approaches to scholarship and pedagogy in the study and interpretation of the visual arts, architecture, cultural heritage, and urban environments.

We believe in the importance of such intellectual work for sustaining the humanities in contemporary society.

The wider agenda of collaborative approaches to Digital Art History and Visual Culture brought us together initially and thus spurs our development into the future. As a result, our name change and new mission statement reflect the intellectual and analytical directions that guide our pedagogic initiatives and increasingly unify our public-oriented research. Indeed, to signal these two equally important legs upon which we stand, we will keep the name of the Wired! Lab internally for our physical space and for our famed Friday afternoons of collaborative research and mentoring between faculty, staff, and students, while externally promoting the new umbrella designation of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.

Our Digital Humanities work on Art Historical and Visual Culture topics constitutes a range of approaches to objects, buildings, and cultural spaces (whether physically extant structures, representations in a painting or a drawing, or even imagined locations). In addition, our lab’s scholars have displayed an equally wide range of interests in diverse digital methods that themselves raise important intellectual questions about computational approaches to culture. From buildings to maps, objects to virtual environments, and cities ancient to modern, we continue to probe the issue of which digital methods are best suited to specific cultural questions. And, conversely, which intellectual issues central to computation might inform our understanding of the analysis of culture? The dialogue between the complex problems in cultural and computational analysis has led to highly productive results over the past decade and is also foundational to the challenges and debates that are relevant to scholars, our students, and the broader public for critical Digital Humanities work.

The dialogue between the complex problems in cultural and computational analysis has led to highly productive results over the past decade and is also foundational to the challenges and debates that are relevant to scholars, our students, and the broader public for critical Digital Humanities work.

Finally, we are excited to harness the energy that comes from our students, our research, and our teaching into the next decade of innovative work. As we reflect on past successes, we also look forward to many further contributions to intellectual life at Duke and to the broader community of scholars and publics. This publication celebrating over ten years of Wired! (and now, the Digital Research Lab) is the most public expression of our mission to engage broadly. It marks our belief in the importance of such intellectual work for sustaining the Humanities in contemporary society. Such engagement is possible through our core commitment to advancing critical digital methods in the analysis of Art History and Visual Culture, a topic on which we have labored with rigor and energy for more than a decade.

The History of Wired!

- Caroline Bruzelius

- Mark J. V. Olson

- John J. Taormina

Wired! began as a question: what will happen if we apply digital technologies to historical inquiry? What kinds of affordances and limitations do state-of-the-art technologies offer art historians to represent and interrogate the three-dimensional forms of architecture and sculpture as they change over time?[1] And, as time has gone by, and as the potential and affordances of digital technologies have expanded over the past ten years, what new initiatives and research questions could the faculty and students at Duke University undertake? These themes have dominated the Wired! enterprise ever since.

Faculty for the 2009 Wired! course. From left to right: Rachael Brady, Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila Dillon, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, Mark J. V. Olson. Image Credit: Umberto Plaja

Beginnings

We were able to do this at Duke because of a fundamental change in the Art & Art History Department, which, after much debate and discussion, had in 2006 changed its title to Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. With the addition of the words “Visual Studies” to the traditional title and practice of an Art History department, colleagues from other disciplines such as Media Studies (Mark J. V. Olson), Engineering (Rachael Brady), and Digital Humanities (Victoria Szabo) were invited into the program. This stimulated a series of conversations that led a core group of faculty[2] to design an experimental course to engage with and illustrate how digital visualization technologies might enrich the understanding and representation of research questions in Art and Architectural History. It was essential, however, to define an operational concept that would be equally stimulating to all partners in this conversation, regardless of their expertise and training. Our answer was the visualization of time and change in the historical past.

Still from the student animation of the construction of San Francesco a Folloni (2012). Image Credit: Michal Koszycki and Rebecca Wood

In Spring 2009, these conversations resulted in an investigational course, New Representational Technologies for Historical Materials. We experimented with visualizing the locations of ancient sculpture in the Hadrianic Baths of Aphrodisias and representing the building chronology of the Franciscan convent of San Francesco a Folloni.

Raquel Salvatella de Prada and Akara Lee (Duke ‘09) in the 2009 Wired! course. Image Credit: Participants in the Wired! course

Students also developed projects on sculpture at the shrine of Apollo on the island of Delos, the construction of the Franciscan church in Piacenza, and the building phases of Santa Croce in Florence. The students worked in small teams of two or three, side-by-side with the faculty, on research questions that were of central interest to the faculty involved.

Sheila Dillon and a student in the 2009 Wired! course. Image Credit: Participants in the Wired! course

The results were spectacular. It was clear to both students and faculty that with the success of the experimental course, “everything had changed.” The discipline of Art and Architectural History exploded open to engage with questions that had to do with process, change, time, and meaning. The core group was galvanized; none could consider abandoning this effort to return to conventional teaching in our respective disciplines. We began to ask new questions of our research; we began to think of how we could engage the public in understanding important questions about our topics (works of art, buildings, and cities). This magical moment of revelation in turn inspired a series of new collaborative and international research initiatives, such as Visualizing Venice, The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database, and Digital Athens, as well as the conviction that the group needed to train the next generation of scholars, graduate students, and young professionals in the radical potential of these new technologies. To accomplish this latter endeavor, we inaugurated a series of summer institutes at Venice International University with support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and The Getty Foundation. We realized that we should also offer a Master’s degree that focused on the intersection of digital technologies and questions about material culture.

The results were spectacular. It was clear to both students and faculty that with the success of the experimental course, “everything had changed.”

Basic to the initiative were certain core concepts: team teaching (combining the expertise of those in Digital Media with Art and Architectural History), group projects (that engaged faculty working alongside students), public presentations, and peer-to-peer teamwork. These operational principles entailed the reconceptualization of courses in order to make time for teaching the appropriate technologies and developing research projects, as well as the support of the administration for the creation of a designated space with appropriate hardware and software.

Alexandra Dodson (PhD 2016) and Michael Koszycki (Duke, ‘09) measure a sculptural object at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Image Credit: Participants in the Wired! course

Also in 2009, the Wired! group received a Franklin Humanities Institute Discussion Grant for a year-long colloquium, New Technologies and the Visual Arts: Reconfiguring Knowledge in the Digital Age. The grant was renewed after the first year. The group planned to meet biweekly at lunchtime with the stated mission to, “expand and develop our collaborations, conversations, and reflections on the implication of new technologies on the field of material culture.”

Basic to the initiative were certain core concepts: team teaching (combining the expertise of those in Digital Media with Art and Architectural History), group projects (that engaged faculty working alongside students), public presentations, and peer-to-peer teamwork.

The colloquium theme focused on rethinking teaching with new technologies in both undergraduate and graduate programs. The core group consisted of Rachael Brady, Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila Dillon, Mark J. V. Olson, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, Victoria Szabo, and John Taormina. Depending on the topic of discussion, guests were invited to join various meetings to add their expertise. These included: faculty, staff, and students from Art, Art History & Visual Studies and other departments or other local universities; Lee Sorensen, Duke’s Librarian for Visual Studies and Dance; the deputy director of IT, Julian Lombardi, and the scholarly communication officer from Duke Libraries, Kevin Smith; the editor of Duke Press, Ken Wissocker; and the University’s digital strategist, Paolo Mangiafico, to name a few. Additional outside speakers, including Arne Flaten, Bernard Frischer, and Anselmo Lastra, were brought in for public lectures on digital technologies and art history.

Rachael Brady demonstrates a photogrammetry setup with Elizabeth Baltes (PhD 2017) and Catherine Stanley (Duke, ‘09). Image Credit: Participants in the Wired! course

We addressed various broad issues involving technologies and humanities:

- that assumptions about how knowledge is organized and taught are being shattered by the possibilities of new technologies;

- how the evolution of a site/building could be represented over time;

- the potential of new technologies to communicate scholarly research;

- how topics could be taught in new and more effective ways through digital technologies;

- how students acquire new technical skills while engaging with primary research materials to create new representations of historical data;

- how students become active rather than passive learners by engaging in hands-on digital reconstruction of a site/building.

Specifically, the group decided on the following colloquium topics:

- Digital Literacy: learning the technical tools, presentation of the product

- Pedagogical Practices: IT training issues, evidence and attribution, spatial history (movement through time), participatory learning, public workshops

- Scholarly Viability: academic validity, collaborative teaching and research, promotion and tenure, scholarly communication

During the colloquium’s two-year period, it was determined that a dedicated physical space with the appropriate equipment—a lab, if you will—would be necessary to properly enhance teaching with digital technologies, conduct group research projects, offer workshops and demonstrations, and provide a sense of community among engaged faculty, staff, and students. After a proposal was written, one-time funding was provided from the Offices of the Provost and Research, space was identified in Smith Warehouse across from Duke’s East Campus, and the new lab took physical shape. It opened on November 10, 2011. Since then, core membership within the lab’s space and its initiative has expanded through the hiring of Kristin Love Huffman, Hannah L. Jacobs, Edward Triplett, and most recently, Paul B. Jaskot and Augustus Wendell.

A New Program

One of the unexpected outcomes of the Reconfiguring Knowledge** discussions was the development of a new Master’s degree with two tracks: “Digital Art History” and “Computational Media.” The group realized that all of the pertinent discussions about digital literacy, pedagogical practices, and scholarly viability had concurrently solidified a viable curriculum in the process: the creation of two required proseminars and appropriate electives taken over an eighteen-month period, culminating in a thesis project. The new MA was launched in Fall 2014.

The group realized that all of the pertinent discussions about digital literacy, pedagogical practices, and scholarly viability had concurrently solidified a viable curriculum in the process: the creation of two required proseminars and appropriate electives taken over an eighteen-month period, culminating in a thesis project.

Building Capacity

Medieval Color Comes to Life project collaborators Mark J. V. Olson, Caroline Bruzelius, Guillermo Sapiro, and Mariano Tepper at the installation’s opening October 4, 2015. Image Credit: Lucas Giles

A Nasher visitor experiences the Lives of Things app for the first time at the installation’s opening October 4, 2015. Image Credit: Lucas Giles

Over the second half of its first ten years, Wired! has both built on its longstanding strengths and expanded its engagements with data, issues of scale, and public-facing scholarship. In 2015, the Medieval Color Comes to Life project, led by Caroline Bruzelius and Mark J. V. Olson, opened its first public exhibition at the Nasher Museum at Duke University, a light-painting application that reminded museum-goers of the vibrant polychromatic origins of the medieval Apostles in the Brummer Collection.

In February 2016, the Wired! Lab organized its first international symposium, Apps, Maps, and Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies, with a standing-room-only attendance of over 150 people from more than forty institutions. One of the speakers at this symposium was Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History at DePaul University, who, with the 2017 retirement of founding member and Wired! Director Caroline Bruzelius, became the new Wired! Director and Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke.

Poster from the 2016 symposium Apps, Maps, & Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies. Design Credit: Jack Edinger

A second Wired! exhibition filled the Nasher’s Incubator Gallery in Fall 2017. Entitled A Portrait of Venice and curated by Kristin Love Huffman, this multimedia exhibition brought the city of Venice to life through interactive displays and augmented reality experiences of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s iconic View of Venice (1500). This was followed in 2019 with Senses of Venice, another exhibition curated by Huffman at The Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery in Duke’s Perkins Library, which introduced the first accurate map of Venice, created by Ludovico Ughi in 1729.

Lab directors Paul B. Jaskot and Caroline Bruzelius explore an interactive installation in A Portrait of Venice with the Dig@Lab’s Postdoctoral Fellow Nevio Danelon, September 7, 2017. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Each of these exhibitions showcased the development of Huffman’s central art historical research questions and the dynamic ways in which such research could be incorporated into new digital methods as well as student-centered contributions.

A visitor to Senses of Venice explores an immersive installation that sends viewers on an interactive exploration of early modern Venice, September 12, 2019. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

Meanwhile, with the addition of Jaskot’s work on Krakow to the lab’s ongoing research on Venice, Athens, Durham, and Paris, the Visualizing Venice project broadened its remit to Visualizing Cities, culminating most recently in a Humanities Unbounded Mellon grant to interlink departmental courses through that theme (to which Wired! faculty and staff are central contributors). As we were expanding our cities related projects, the success of our Visualizing Venice summer institutes also brought additional funding from The Getty Foundation, the NEH, and the Mellon Foundation to host several institutes on advanced topics in Digital Art History at Duke, Venice International University, and the National Humanities Center in summers 2017, 2018, and 2019. These experiences deepened our collaborations with colleagues at the University of Padua and opened up new exchanges with partners at the University of Exeter, highlighting the further international impact of Wired!’s work.

These experiences deepened our collaborations with colleagues at the University of Padua and opened up new exchanges with partners at the University of Exeter, highlighting the further international impact of Wired!’s work.

In October 2019, Wired! hosted its second digital symposium at Duke, Centering Art History and Visual Culture in the Digital Humanities, which brought core contributions of art historians and visual culture scholars to the spatial Digital Humanities. Looking at objects and environments at a wide variety of scales, panelists asked: What kinds of spatial and temporal cultural problems can be addressed with digital methods? Conversely, speakers addressed how art and visual culture extend and complicate developments within the Digital Humanities. This conference also signaled our interest in being at the forefront of current Digital Art History and Visual Culture debates.

Poster for the 2019 symposium, Centering Art History & Visual Culture in the Digital Humanities. Design Credit: Jack Edinger

During this same time period, Wired! complemented its geospatial visualization efforts with archive building and data visualization. The Dictionary of Art Historians, an independent research project led by Lee Sorensen and Hannah L. Jacobs which joined the lab in 2016, had significant infrastructural development and expansion, launching a new website in 2018. In January 2019, Sorensen and Jacobs were invited to present their database work at the Getty Research Institute.

The Wired! Lab team for the National Gallery of Art’s inaugural Datathon. From left to right: Mark J. V. Olson, Victoria Szabo, Paul Jaskot, Ed Triplett. Hannah L. Jacobs not pictured. Image credit: National Gallery of Art

In November 2019, a team from the Wired! Lab represented Duke University at the National Gallery of Art’s inaugural Datathon—over two days of intensive data visualization development, brainstorming what new research questions might be explored in relation to the NGA’s massive collections dataset. Both of these opportunities highlight the importance of expanding collaboratives for Digital Art History as well as Wired!’s leadership role in that subfield.

Looking Ahead

Finally, in the current moment of the COVID pandemic and social instability around questions of justice around the world, the Wired! Lab has dealt with the same challenges that have faced students and universities globally; yet our previous years of employing digital methods, collaborative research, and teaching practices have also allowed us to serve the university and art historical community in new ways, especially as our research and courses went online.

With the continuation of classes online in the current moment, Wired! contributes to the dynamic exploration of the central importance of art historical and visual cultural questions to the education of Duke students and to the broader world, from its long history of digital methods, research, and pedagogy.

Mark J. V. Olson helped to spearhead the Nasher’s first foray into virtual exhibitions with Virtual Cultures of the Sea. Hannah L. Jacobs, our Digital Humanities Specialist, organized and distributed multiple resources for our program on digital pedagogies. In addition, she and other members of the Wired! Lab began organizing Friday seminars around the specific theme of Visualizing Cities that engaged other members of the department and kept our student community together. Our Wired! students also participated in online workshops that skilled them up in new digital methods, such as the use of the digital visualization software Tableau. With the continuation of classes online in the current moment, Wired! contributes to the dynamic exploration of the central importance of art historical and visual cultural questions to the education of Duke students and to the broader world, from its long history of digital methods, research, and pedagogy. In all of this work, we continue to search for the best in critical Digital Humanities methods to help our researchers and students face the daunting challenges of understanding the cultural past and present, and prepare for the future.

Banner Image: Image of a vaulted ceiling showing stereotomy in the stonework. Image Credit: Sara Galletti

Notes

1. Our first questions had to do with the visualization of process and change in medieval architecture (Caroline Bruzelius) and the role and sequence of sculpture in Greek sanctuaries and urban spaces (Sheila Dillon). ↩︎

2. Rachael Brady, Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila Dillon, Mark J. V. Olson, and Raquel Salvatella de Prada. ↩︎

A New Lab Model for Art History & Visual Culture

- Kristin L. Huffman

Research Practice as a Vehicle for Integrating Pedagogy and Scholarship

The Wired! Lab’s innovative combination of expert-led scholarly research and student training has had a strong impact on how we practice Humanities-based scholarship. The lab’s model, implemented as a highly experimental enterprise within Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke (see History), has established a paradigm for how to combine, effectively and meaningfully, humanities research, pedagogy, and scholarly output. It has done this through practice-based, team-built teaching and learning. The Lab’s research teams and classes make and do scholarship in ways that translate into completed outcomes, which not only enhance the process of learning in semester increments, but also contribute to and result in long-developed public-facing outputs.

Teams at work during a Friday lab session, Fall 2019. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

The research drives the pedagogy and has resulted in a new methodology. The process, an accomplishment for its contributions to the field, has led to a variety of scholarly work. This work includes traditional formats, such as articles and edited volumes (Visualizing Venice) along with newer forms of public-facing scholarship, such as engaging, digitally-driven exhibitions (A Portrait of Venice and Senses of Venice), augmented-reality cultural interventions (Statues Speak and Digital Durham), and online platforms with vast repositories of data and visualized knowledge (The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database and the Dictionary of Art Historians).

A Model for Practice-Based Learning

The Wired! Lab’s research-teaching model has led the way among Digital Art History programs within academic research institutions across the country since its founding more than ten years ago. The year 2013 marked a turning point in its integrated teaching/learning strategies. In that year, the lab capitalized on funds from an internal Duke grant (Humanities Writ Large Mellon Funds) to support undergraduate student research and learning opportunities through fellowships connected to specific research projects.

Members of the Digital Athens team at work, Fall 2014. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Student fellows, working alongside faculty, Digital Humanities staff, and librarians as well as graduate students, contributed to five long-term research projects hosted within our lab, a physical space embedded within the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies.[1] Since then the number of research projects has more than doubled, the number of digital methods expanded, and the opportunities extended to students have exploded.

Timothy Shea (PhD 2018) learns Medieval stone carving techniques with artist Simon Verity, January 2015. Image Credit: Kyle Wilkinson

Signature courses, such as the survey course developed in Neatline by Caroline Bruzelius and Hannah L. Jacobs with Lee Sorensen and Joseph C. Williams, Gothic Cathedrals (Caroline Bruzelius), and a first-year seminar on early modern Venice (Kristin Love Huffman), have attracted students to come work in the lab on long-term research projects following the completion of their coursework. In addition, student research within the lab has led to tailored independent studies and senior thesis projects (distinction). Finally, and most importantly for department and inter-departmental programs of study, in the lab’s ten years, the team has developed new curricular pathways and professional development for both undergraduate and graduate students (see Teaching).

Building Duke students Priya Parkash and Rayhan Jhanji comparing documents from the University Archives, 2018-2019. Image Credit: Amanda Lazarus

One example that underscores the various pathways of innovative research-based learning is the first-year seminar (VMS 89S Mapping and Modeling Early Modern Venice and later VMS 89S Visual Culture of Venice). This course was established as a means of exposing students to new teaching-learning strategies with an eye toward the recruitment of exceptional students to the lab. It began with a research question: how do we study lost architectural spaces both as independent spatial and relational objects, as well as within their original contexts as organic structures that change over time? The course included the training of a graduate student working closely with a Digital Humanities expert to generate modeling exercises that formed the foundation for the development of student projects. Workshops, tutorials, and ongoing consultation for the course also included mentoring and training workshops with our colleagues Andrea Giordano and Cosimo Monteleone at the University of Padua’s School of Architecture and Engineering. The research idea that led to the development of the course—a scholarly investigation into a demolished church in the most important public square of Venice: Piazza San Marco—resulted in a co-authored publication in the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians, among other productive results.

Paul B. Jaskot and Paloma Rodney (Duke ‘20) in front of the poster Paloma presented at the College Art Association Annual Meeting in February 2020, which shared research from her distinction thesis, Political History of Prisons: The Architecture of People in Raleigh’s Central Penitentiary. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Fridays in the Lab: Community & Shared Learning

On Fridays the lab is filled with our faculty, staff, and students, brimming with energy and the constant buzz of animated intellectual exchanges. Since 2013, teams have been meeting in the lab’s physical space to work out problems, build together, and apply collected research in an effort to advance scholarly projects.

Lab undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty work together on various projects at the lab’s central seminar table, Fall 2014. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Here, graduate students mentor and guide undergraduates, faculty and staff solve research questions with graduates and undergraduates, and undergraduates (to come full circle) offer their particular sets of expertise to inform the rest of the team.

The tradition continues in Fall 2019. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

In this, every member contributes to the process of making; there is never a unilateral “teaching” but rather a multi-dimensional, constantly unfolding process of answering research questions—a process that is unique and to which every member contributes to arrive at an answer, new ideas, and final scholarly conclusion.

Angela Tawfik (Duke ‘19), Kristin Love Huffman, and Noah Michaud (Duke ‘21) at the opening of Senses of Venice, Fall 2019. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

A Win-Win for Faculty, Staff, and Students

This unique approach to the integration of ongoing research and adaptable instruction has permitted an imaginative application of new types of closely mentored teaching and research. For faculty and staff, there is innovation, creativity, the application of new digital methodologies along with traditional scholarly modes, making, and building. All this leads to new analyses and ways of thinking about well-studied material; new discoveries; new scholarly opportunities with engaging platforms, including reaching wider audiences than traditionally available; and, ultimately, new ways of developing our potential as the best possible scholar-teachers.

Mark J. V. Olson works with Curator Julia McHugh and students Hanyan Li and Aisling Henihan (UNC-Chapel Hill, ‘19) to create photogrammetric models of artifacts for the Art of the Americas Interactive project, January 2019. Image Credit: J. Caldwell

For students, the lab has offered opportunities to engage with faculty and staff in meaningful ways. This includes public-facing scholarship (Visualizing Venice); team-based training; learning by doing; avenues for individual research; and possibilities for co-authored published material. It bears underscoring, however, that while the outcomes have been numerous and successful, it is the process that is so exceptional.

Book of Fortresses team members at work in the XR Studio, Fall 2019. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

The translation of traditional research into digital formats—be it the 3D modeling of a church, palace, or castle, or the creation of repositories of data—often opens up as many new questions as are answered. It is here that the magic happens and the collaborative, ongoing process of making reveals new lines of inquiry and, at times, pushes collaborators (students, faculty, and staff) to engage with the material in creative, critically unexpected, and imaginative ways.

It is here that the magic happens and the collaborative, ongoing process of making reveals new lines of inquiry and, at times, pushes collaborators (students, faculty, and staff) to engage with the material in creative, critically unexpected, and imaginative ways.

The “unknowns” and “uncertainties” come out into the open and can no longer be kept hidden, swept into the time-honored footnote for a later solution. It is from this making together—undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff with specialized knowledge—that a new methodological model for both research and teaching has emerged.

Banner Image: The Sandcastle team uses image tagging technologies to help computers ‘see’ the components of historic views. This view shows the annotation of the Lisbon Cathedral in the Braun Hogenberg View. Image Credit: Edward Triplett

Notes

1. The first five projects were: Digital Athens, The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database, The Lives of Things, Operating Archives, and A Portrait of Venice. ↩︎

Research

The Wired! Lab leads with research, which is fundamental to our courses, our Friday working lab, and our scholarly output. Indeed, our research agenda’s increasing profile has led us to our new name: the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (see Introduction). This section briefly explores the core thematic areas of overlap in our research—the study of the object, the consideration of cultural spaces and systems, and the question of the scale of cultural analysis—and then turns to summaries of our sixteen active research projects. These projects are the dynamic center of our teaching, lab work, and outward-facing scholarship. They complement, in turn, the last part of this section, which lists previous Wired! projects. However specialized our research projects may be, they also highlight our broad and collaborative approach to the critical digital analysis of Art History and Visual Culture, the lab’s fundamental mission.

Objects

- Paul B. Jaskot

- Mark J. V. Olson

The fundamental subject of Art History and Visual Culture is inevitably the object. The work of art, the artifact, the building, the sculpture, the ceramic pot, the orphan photograph—the list of possible cultural objects is vast and infinitely varied, drawing us to their study as keys to exploring the great range of human creativity. Computational methods and digital visualizations have provided a unique and exciting way to analyze objects anew in order to raise new research questions and new analytic conclusions in Art History and Visual Culture.

Students try the augmented reality installation, part of A Portrait of Venice. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Obviously, the object has not always been the center of culture analysis. For example, early Art History was much more likely to focus on the biography of the artist, and even in the opening of the twentieth century one could more easily find scholarship studying connoisseurship or the typological nature of artworks rather than their individual qualities or meanings. Yet, over the course of the last century, the focus on cultural objects as individual works worth studying has more and more taken center stage. Our scholarly work has contributed to this tradition and has added new methodological approaches with digital technologies that have pushed our understanding of cultural objects in new ways.

While it has been feared that the digital distracts attention from, or worse, completely displaces the need to study physical objects firsthand, our experience has been the opposite.

While it has been feared that the digital distracts attention from, or worse, completely displaces the need to study physical objects firsthand, our experience has been the opposite. On the one hand, the perceptual registers opened up by computation can yield new insights and pose new questions about the “thinginess of things:” their material composition, the conditions and techniques of their production, and their connection to other artifacts. On the other hand, and often simultaneously, any attempt to render digital an object confronts that object’s recalcitrant materiality and the inherent limitations of being digitally sampled or translated into a strict algorithmic logic. As such, the analytics place the object and its computational surrogate in a productive dialectic that foregrounds the materiality of both.

Digital models of ivory manikins being studied by the Operating Archives team. Image Credit: Mark J. V. Olson

The thematic focus on the object as artistic or cultural evidence has led to a rich range of questions and approaches in the work of lab faculty, staff, and students. In Digital Athens, for example, constructing a database of the individual remains of sculpture in the Agora has led to thinking about the transient meanings of sculpture and change over time. Conversely, a focus on individual works of art and buildings in the Venice initiatives, as exemplified in such projects as the A Portrait of Venice exhibition related to the de’ Barbari View of Venice (1500), has shown how a close concentration on a single work of art using digital methods, in particular the wooden blocks that were used to print the woodcut, can lead to an entirely new understanding of the object and the city itself. Digital methods have also been used by our teams to visualize the complexities of objects in new ways.

Digital methods have also been used by our teams to visualize the complexities of objects in new ways.

The Book of Fortresses project has shown the extraordinary finds that can be made by using digital means to visualize the spatial views of the important early modern Portuguese Livro das Fortalezas, even as the project lays bare the limitations of Cartesian perspectivalism embedded deep into the fabric of contemporary geospatial and 3D visualization tools.

A point cloud model of a Portuguese fortress, part of the Book of Fortresses. Image Credit: Edward Triplett

In a very different vein, the Operating Archives project has used 3D modeling to balance questions of preservation with the analytic need to physically explore Duke’s rare collection of ivory anatomical models. In all of these cases, the centrality of the object as both the subject of study as well as the means of expanding other cultural questions has proven productive.

The lab’s foundational concern with change over time has led to a sustained engagement with the storied “lives of things” and to fascinating new ways of telling digital stories about works

The lab’s foundational concern with change over time has led to a sustained engagement with the storied “lives of things” and to fascinating new ways of telling digital stories about works, such as in the recent Art of the Americas Interactive project.

Image showing photogrammetric phases of creating a digital model. The object is a 15th-century Incan pacha in the Nasher Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Image Credit: Edward Triplett

In this extension of a Nasher exhibition on the value of the sea as a motif in the ceramics, textiles, and carvings of ancient Central and South American coastal cultures, the team developed an interactive digital platform that seeks to expand the history and analysis of these artifacts in creative ways. In all of this, though, the individual works of art take center stage. The intense interaction of digital methods, visualization, and object analysis are fundamental as a thematic core of many a Wired! project.

Banner Image: Image showing photogrammetric phases of creating a digital model. The object is a 15th-century Incan pacha in the Nasher Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Image Credit: Edward Triplett

Spaces & Systems

- Victoria Szabo

- Edward Triplett

Digital mapping and spatial analysis have become important ways to contextualize and frame the production of visual culture and art historical objects, as well as their circulation and reception. Understanding artifacts on-site—how they operate, are experienced, and change over time—aids the processes fundamental to the analysis and interpretation of their cultural and aesthetic significance. Mapping networks of influence, charting flows of goods and services, or tracking cost-paths have become recognized approaches in the field.

Still image from a simulation of the views a pilgrim would experience along the St. James Way, part of Modeling Agency. Image Credit: Augustus Wendell

Adding a third dimension further enriches it by enabling researchers to place 3D models within such contexts, to perform viewshed analyses, and to construct spatially organized databases connected to rich collections of primary and secondary source materials. These latter benefits are not trivial as they allow researchers to aggregate their research projects and datasets, enabling the field to build more collectively than ever before. Further, by making these resources available via the web, we have the opportunity to use platforms for scaling up via integrated datasets. In addition, platforms themselves can be used for digital storytelling to reach broader publics—a complement to written scholarship.

Understanding artifacts on-site—how they operate, are experienced, and change over time—aids the processes fundamental to the analysis and interpretation of their cultural and aesthetic significance.

It should not be surprising that spatial questions were some of the first asked as the Humanities experienced a “digital turn” in the 1990s. Geography is a natural bridge-field between social, material, and environmental evidence, and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has a firm foothold in Digital Humanities as a common system for structuring spatial data about the past and present; it bears noting that Humanities work has also informed the ongoing capabilities of these technologies, underscoring how visualizing data remains a deeply interpretive act.

The Sandcastle team uses image tagging technologies to help computers ‘see’ the components of historic views. This view shows the annotation of the Lisbon Cathedral in the Braun Hogenberg View. Image Credit: Edward Triplett

The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab is no exception in its pursuit of spatial patterns through GIS and other digital mapping approaches. Early approaches such as those of Digital Athens, The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database, and Visualizing Venice, have all had place as central to their research questions, and over the last ten years each project’s collaborators have pursued iterative, structured processes that extend the challenging work of continuously adding sources to a spatially-aware system. This tradition of place-based digital research is continued in the exploration of the local context of architecture and spaces in Building Duke, Digital Durham, Paris of Waters, and the Digital Public Buildings in North Carolina, and more broadly through Mapping German Construction, Mapping Stereotomy, and the Book of Fortresses projects.

Venice has proven to be a particularly rich subject for publicly engaged, spatial storytelling via museum exhibitions and online videos of rendered 3D scenes.

Venice has proven to be a particularly rich subject for publicly engaged, spatial storytelling via museum exhibitions and online videos of rendered 3D scenes. These projects have led to one of our most sustained group partnerships with the international Visualizing Venice research team. Alongside our partners in Italy, we have co-developed digital art and architectural history projects that rely on digital tools such as mapping, modeling, and data analysis to deepen research, open up new questions, and disseminate information through innovative presentation strategies such as exhibitions, virtual environments, and mobile applications.

An edited volume from Routledge details the results of our collaboration through a variety of case study examples. As a community, we continue to produce “hybrid” art historical scholarship not only on Venetian subjects but also on other art historical and urban contexts, such as Krakow, Athens, and Padua. While the modes of publishing our Venice research have varied considerably, each of them emphasizes close looking and reading of primary sources, a mindfulness to the socially constructed nature of space, and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of Art History and Visual Culture through additional research into ever-advancing technologies.

While the modes of publishing our Venice research have varied considerably, each of them emphasizes close looking and reading of primary sources, a mindfulness to the socially constructed nature of space, and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of Art History and Visual Culture through additional research into ever-advancing technologies.

As the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab moves forward, our spatial and place-based projects are beginning to cross lines that have unnecessarily been drawn according to technological choices. Just as it will eventually be unnecessary to add the prefix “Digital” to Art History, we look forward to the development of research that is not quickly categorized by the tools used to create it—as a GIS, CAD, or Augmented Reality project. Some of our own scholarly projects are already operating that way. Our work on space and place already moves between these methodological, but not theoretical, boundaries, and we will continue to draw from the collective variety of approaches we have used over the last ten years and to offer the broader field of Art History our insights and pathways as we move forward.

Banner Image: Edward Triplett studies a point cloud of a Portuguese fortress. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

Scale

- Paul B. Jaskot

One of the most important contributions digital methods bring to the Humanities is the ability to work with historical evidence at a variety of scales. The chance to visualize thousands of buildings rather than a few, to analyze hundreds of primary sources in only a few minutes, or to work from a database of numerous artworks or art historical biographies each allow for radically different research questions.

Interactive map of the sites in The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database. Map Design: Brian Norberg and Hannah Jacobs

Part of the major research contributions of Wired! faculty and staff in these areas have included the production of database resources that have attracted the attention of scholars as well as led to invitations from key cultural institutions who are interested in our work and methods (Dictionary of Art Historians and The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database). The latter include, among others, the Getty Research Institute and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

One of the most important contributions digital methods bring to the Humanities is the ability to work with historical evidence at a variety of scales. The chance to visualize thousands of buildings rather than a few, to analyze hundreds of primary sources in only a few minutes, or to work from a database of numerous artworks or art historical biographies each allow for radically different research questions.

In addition to building new intellectual corpora, our research efforts have led to a range of new questions that arise only when one looks at evidence at scale.

Map showing Nazi forced-labor construction sites around Kraków. Map created by Antonio LoPiano

These include, for example, the transfer of architectural or cultural knowledge across vast geographic ranges (Mapping Stereotomy and Mapping German Construction), the comparison of large numbers of buildings or images to raise innovative issues of typology (Book of Fortresses and Senses of Venice), or the incorporation of significant quantities of images and primary documents to create a dynamic research environment through Augmented Reality apps (Digital Durham and Visualizing Venice’s Ghett/App) that open up and expand urban experience.

Each one of these examples highlights our commitment not merely to add another project to the art historical universe, but rather to reimagine how computational methods and cultural evidence can relate in altogether new and radical ways. We aim to rethink our discipline and its relevant methodologies in order to create a more critical and engaged scholarship. A focus on scale helps us strive for that goal.

Banner Image: Model of an ideal plan, not completed, for Nazi-occupied Krakow. Created by Davide Contiero for the Mapping German Construction project. Image Credit: Davide Contiero

Current Projects

Research Initiatives & Outreach

- Kristin L. Huffman

Visualizing Venice to Visualizing Cities

Cover for Visualizing Venice: Mapping and Modeling Time and Change in a City.

Visualizing Venice is a multidisciplinary, multi-year, cross-cultural collaboration research project that supports mapping, 3D modeling, digital storytelling, and representing change over time in Venice. The public facing projects have demonstrated a new approach to traditional art historical material and have prompted researchers and students to think about Art, Architectural, and Urban History in innovative ways. Its published scholarship—in the form of exhibitions along with traditional forms, such as books and articles—has translated archival study and onsite research into digital visualizations and has shown how it is possible to interpret, represent, and teach Architectural and Urban History in a dynamic and scientific way. It has also served as an umbrella research agenda and teaching curriculum for the Wired! Lab. Most recently, Visualizing Venice has expanded to become Visualizing Cities. Our intention is to apply the methodologies developed to include a broader range of international sites, including Paris, Athens, Durham, and, most recently, Krakow.

The collaboration began parallel to the Wired! Lab in 2009 with three research institutions: Duke University (Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Durham, NC); Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy (Dipartimento di Architettura Costruzione Conservazione); Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy (Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Edile e Ambientale). Over the first several years, the scholars of these institutions established a rigorous methodology that mediates between traditional historical discourses and the many possibilities offered by visualization technologies. The history of places and architecture has engaged with the representation of change over time, and Visualizing Venice’s (now Visualizing Cities’) purpose was to collect, maintain, and convey scholarly, archival research through more innovative visualization strategies, such as 3D reconstructions, inter-operable databases, animations, and augmented and virtual realities. Visualizing Cities is an example of how to interpret, represent, teach, and promote knowledge and artistic and architectural heritage related to the history of cities or territories over space and time.

Research Outreach with Scholarly Symposia

Over time, we have become a leader in the field with our established methodologies. For this reason, we have been uniquely positioned to host scholarly conversations in the form of symposia in addition to our workshops that provide foundational training for scholars in the field. Each of these symposia occurred at a pivotal point in the lab and coincided with the fifth- and tenth-year anniversaries of the foundation of the lab.

Poster from the 2016 symposium Apps, Maps, & Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies. Design Credit: Jack Edinger

For each, leaders in the field of Digital Art History convened to share their scholarship, discuss challenges, and mark a point in the conversation about how our scholarship links more broadly to the Digital Humanities.

Poster for the 2019 symposium, Centering Art History & Visual Culture in the Digital Humanities. Design Credit: Jack Edinger

For information related to the speakers and their leadership in collaborative projects, please see the following links:

- Centering Art History and Visual Culture in the Digital Humanities (2019)

- Apps, Maps, and Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies (2016)

Banner Image: A point cloud model of a Portuguese fortress, part of the Book of Fortresses Image Credit: Edward Triplett

Past Projects

Teaching

At the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, teaching and research go hand in hand. There are several aspects of our teaching practices that help explain our commitment to specific research methods and our attention to critical digital analyses. In both classes and lab sessions, we are committed to the use of collaborative models of teaching, the incorporation of our research methods into every level of the curriculum, and the professional growth of graduate students. This section highlights those areas of commitment.

Collaborative Teaching

- Hannah L. Jacobs

Combining technologies and humanities in teaching requires knowledge from a variety of disciplines. Our first course, the 2009 Wired! New Representation Technologies for Historical Materials, brought together five faculty representing that necessary range of expertise from the historical to the computational, with ten undergraduate and graduate students. Working in an experimental learning environment, students engaged with primary source materials and explored the possibilities that technologies offer for advancing humanistic interpretations of these materials. The faculty’s various expertise enabled students to consider objects’ original contexts and select digital methods appropriate for reconsidering their composition, methods of making, and possible roles in larger built environments. This first collaboration formed a model on which Wired! courses have since been taught in which the inclusion of multiple instructional expertise form an integrated, creative, and active learning experience.

This first collaboration formed a model on which Wired! courses have since been taught in which the inclusion of multiple instructional expertise form an integrated, creative, and active learning experience.

Notably, our teaching model has since expanded to also include the expertise of staff, librarians, and graduate students. These contributors are not simply offering technical instruction: they work with instructors of record to design and implement digital project assignments and with students to develop and critique those assignments. A quintessential example can be found in the Spring 2015 iteration of ARTHIST 101 Introduction to Art History in which Professor Caroline Bruzelius worked closely with Librarian Lee Sorensen, Graduate Teaching Assistant Joseph C. Williams, and Digital Humanities Specialist Hannah L. Jacobs to develop both a digital assignment and an interactive syllabus.

Screen capture from the Neatline interactive syllabus showing content from one class meeting including an historic map of the spatial region, lecture slides, and specific sites of interest. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Implemented as an integrated map and timeline with embedded visual media and course materials, the interactive syllabus proved a creative way for students to build conceptual connections across vast time periods, spaces, and cultures. Sorensen and Williams identified appropriate research materials for the interactive syllabus. Jacobs brought these contents together in Omeka with Neatline to create an alternative, non-linear interface for navigating course content. For the digital assignment, Sorensen offered information literacy instruction critical to Humanities research, and Jacobs taught the students principles of data management in Omeka and visual storytelling through Neatline, which they used together with critical research skills to create digital projects that explored the movements of materials and culturally significant objects across the pre-modern world. This syllabus also served as a foundational example for the students’ semester-long research project.

The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab now regularly offers a teaching assistantship to a PhD student in Art History for the purpose of providing Digital Humanities training and instructional experience that extends our collaborative model.

Williams provided one-on-one Omeka and Neatline support for students, a key instructional training opportunity that has become a core part of the Wired! Lab’s contributions to graduate education. The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab now regularly offers a teaching assistantship to a PhD student in Art History for the purpose of providing Digital Humanities training and instructional experience that extends our collaborative model. Through mentorship from, and collaboration with, Jacobs and other instructors, these teaching assistants learn how to create instructional materials and lead technical instruction, consult on and troubleshoot digital methods, and evaluate digital assignments based on both humanistic and technical rubrics.

This kind of collaborative teaching has formed the basis for courses that explore the visual culture of Venice, historical experiences of Durham, the construction of medieval castles, the archaeology of Athens, and much more. As we have applied our teaching model in different courses, we have found that the balance between digital and humanistic learning goals varies depending on course level, digital method, and historical content. The extent to which digital methods are engaged in a course impacts the overall shape of our collaborative teaching: a course with a small digital intervention, such as the creation of a timeline, requires a modular approach to technical instruction involving the Digital Humanities Specialist and a Graduate Teaching Assistant.

These begin at the early design phase of the assignment and then continue for several class meetings focused on skill-based workshops, troubleshooting, and assignment critiques. Meanwhile, some courses are centered on semester-length projects, such as those in which students use 3D modeling software to reconstruct a historical building. Instructors often use this method to teach visual analysis skills: to create their models, students must closely analyze visual materials and develop a detailed understanding of architecture and its environment.

Model of the destroyed Palazzo Nani in Venice, created by students in Kristin Love Huffman’s 2015 Visualizing Venetian Art and completed by Julia Huang (Duke ‘16) in 2016. Image Credit: Julia Huang

The technical skills required to complete these kinds of analyses in the context of a one-semester course are extensive and require modular instruction spanning the entire semester. In some cases, continuous interaction with the lab’s Digital Humanities Specialist and/or a Graduate Teaching Assistant is required to ensure that students gain a foundational understanding of a digital method and are able to apply it critically to their research questions.

Still other courses take a further step toward the technological and require a deeper collaboration that directly involves students in teaching. These courses are also project-based, center on questions of applying digital technologies to humanities research questions, and produce a single, experimental outcome. Examples have included a close analysis of scant historical materials to digitally construct a destroyed Venetian palazzo and the design of a narrative and augmented reality application to engage museum goers with objects in the Nasher Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Students presenting their augmented reality app prototype, Spring 2017. Image Credit: Caroline Bruzelius

Multiple faculty, staff, graduate teaching assistants, and/or librarians are embedded in these courses to guide a learning experience that draws on a range of disciplinary expertise, while advanced undergraduate and graduate students actively participate in the project’s shaping and may contribute their own technical skills to instruction.

The flexibility in the level of engagement and range of expertise involved in our collaborative teaching model promotes active learning and innovative thinking for all involved. Our teaching practices creatively combine multiple knowledge domains to provide students with distinctive learning experiences that ask them to engage critically with both historical content and digital methods.

Banner Image: Model of the destroyed Palazzo Nani in Venice, created by students in Kristin L. Huffman’s 2015 Visualizing Venetian Art and completed by Julia Huang (Duke ‘16) in 2016. Image Credit: Julia Huang

Curriculum

- Paul B. Jaskot

The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab curriculum is both wide and deep. Its depth extends through the undergraduate curriculum from innovative and popular first-year seminars such as VMS 89S Visual Culture of Venice and entry-level courses such as ARTHIST 227 Medieval Castles of Europe and, one of our oldest core offerings, ARTHIST 225 Gothic Cathedrals. Students can further their engagement through intermediate and advanced seminars that also engage graduate students, such as ARTHIST 315 Mapping History with GIS and ARTHIST 551SL Wired! The Lives of Things.

Undergraduate and graduate students learn side by side in the 2012 course The Museum Inside Out. Image Credit: Nasher Staff

A number of these advanced experiences have been made possible through important initiatives such as the Bass Connections projects Building Duke and Digital Durham, to name but two.

The Digital Art History & Visual Culture curriculum is both wide and deep. Its depth extends through the undergraduate curriculum from innovative and popular first-year seminars. Students can further their engagement through intermediate and advanced seminars that also engage graduate students.

Conversely, we support Art History and Visual Culture courses that have incorporated digital components for assignments or specific collaborative projects such as in ARTHIST 284 The Political History of Modern Architecture and ARTHIST 208 The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Athens. At the graduate level, Wired! contributes to the key core offering of a two-semester Proseminar sequence (HCVIS 580S & 581S) that introduces Digital Humanities methods within the context of Art History and Computational Media. Graduate students develop individual digital projects that extend from our faculty offerings including A Cultural Analysis of Ghettos or 3D Design and Programming in Art & Medicine, the latter of which yielded Medieval Color Comes to Light. As this range shows, the Wired! faculty and staff cover a wide spectrum of student careers at Duke and also engage in a variety of topics across the Digital Humanities, while taking up innovative subjects in Art History and Visual Culture.

Banner Image: Caroline Bruzelius and Sheila Dillon study an object in the Nasher Museum of Art's permanent collection. Image Credit: Nasher Staff

An Exemplary Course

- Caroline Bruzelius

The Wired! Lab experience emerged from one course taught at Duke University that began with my arrival at Duke in 1981: Gothic Cathedrals. Because it attracted students from numerous disciplines (Biology, Political Science, and Economics, for example), it was hard to assign a meaningful research topic, so, instead, I developed a new type of assignment: a fictional cathedral with an “historical” narrative and design that included a ground plan, façade, elevation, section, and full decorative program.

Students measure architectural features in the Duke Chapel for a Gothic Cathedrals assignment.

Students were encouraged to be as original as possible, while at the same time respecting historical facts, regional styles, and locally available materials. These new cathedrals had to “stand up in a strong wind,” so vaults and buttressing needed to be structurally sound. Each team also had to produce a budget, estimating sources of income (taxing peasants was always a favorite), and the costs and scale of the labor force. At the end of the semester, projects were presented in front of a jury of colleagues and graduate students and prizes were awarded by a dean, the provost, and once even then-president of Duke, Richard Brodhead.

Students were encouraged to be as original as possible, while at the same time respecting historical facts, regional styles, and locally available materials. These new cathedrals had to “stand up in a strong wind.”

How did technology get into the picture? Around 2002 I decided to try having students produce their design components using AutoCad, and the results were spectacular. Instead of pencil drawings, we had professional renderings of façades, ground plans, sections, and elevations; the integration of computer-aided design exponentially raised the level of the visual components of the project. That “floated” the other components upwards: the historical narrative, the decorative program, and budget and labor projections were produced with new levels of professionalism.

With this experience in mind, and with new faculty brought into the department as part of the Mellon-funded Visual Studies Initiative, I began to talk with a new colleague, Rachael Brady, whose primary appointment was in Engineering. We transferred one cathedral design (by Charles Sparkman, Duke ’09) into Unity to present in the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE): now a student-designed cathedral could be experienced as real space.

Images of Charles Sparkman’s Gothic Cathedrals project in the DiVE, Duke’s cave environment. (2011) Image Credit: Charles Sparkman

Rachael and I considered whether we might engage in other projects and found a common interest in the topic of representing time: could new digital tools enable us to narrate time and change in buildings and cities? Could we develop a narrative form that could tell stories about how the spaces and places of the past were repeatedly transformed? As a result of our experience in the Gothic Cathedrals course, in 2008 we began to plan an experimental course that would test the potential of digital visualization tools for historical topics. We roped in several colleagues—Sheila Dillon, Mark J. V. Olson, and Raquel Salvatella de Prada—along the way, and offered a course, Wired! New Representational Technologies, in Spring 2009 where we modeled the construction phases of a medieval monastery near Naples, San Francesco a Folloni; the construction of Santa Croce I in Florence; and the architecture and sculptural decoration of the ancient bath at Aphrodisias in Turkey, among other projects. We were so enthused we baptized our new initiative “Wired!”

Technology changes everything: the questions that art historians ask of their evidence, the ways we communicate narratives about time and process in cities and buildings, and the capacities of digital tools to generate new knowledge.

Technology changes everything: the questions that art historians ask of their evidence, the ways we communicate narratives about time and process in cities and buildings, and the capacities of digital tools to generate new knowledge. Digital technology presented a bright future in our fields, and we had a responsibility to our students as well as to the discipline to keep exploring. It was a decisive moment, and there was no going back to traditional art history.

And that is exactly what the Wired! team has done for the past ten years.

Bridgewater Abbey, a model created in a recent Gothic Cathedrals course taught by Edward Triplett.

Banner Image: Ground plans and elevations for a hypothetical gothic cathedral by Charles Sparkman (Duke, ‘09).

PhD Students in the Wired! Lab

- Sheila Dillon

Since the lab’s inception, graduate students have been an important part of Wired!. They can serve as co-PIs of various research projects, as project managers, or as research team members who also function as mentors to undergraduate participants following a vertically integrated model of teaching and scholarship (see A New Lab Model for Art History & Visual Culture and Collaborative Teaching). Many of these graduate students have gone on to write dissertations that incorporate visualization techniques that they learned in the lab. Some even developed their own research projects and recruited student teams to realize them (e.g. Statues Speak, Elizabeth Baltes, PhD 2016). Not only do the graduate students of Wired! learn visualization software, strategies, and methods that they can then deploy in their own research, but they also gain experience in project management, collaborative research, and teaching.

Joseph C. Williams working with Caroline Bruzelius in the Wired! Lab in 2014. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

In addition to participating in research teams, graduate students who have worked in the Wired! Lab can further develop the visualization skills they have learned by serving as teaching assistants for undergraduate courses, which have increasingly incorporated Digital Humanities projects in their curriculum. These teaching assistants are mentored by the lab’s Digital Humanities Specialist, Hannah L. Jacobs, and lab faculty. For example, as a Digital Humanities TA for the courses VMS 89S Visual Culture of Venice and ARTHIST 255 Art in Renaissance Italy, Nikos Gkiokas helped students with their ArcGIS Story Maps and Omeka/Neatline projects. He also led a workshop on Neatline for ARTHIST 184D History of Pre-Modern Architecture. In a different context as the Wired! TA for the Friday open lab meetings, Felipe Alvarez de Toledo developed a resource for humanists to learn the Python programming language. As a TA for another iteration of VMS 89S Visual Culture of Venice, he taught students how to use Omeka for developing digital research collections and Neatline for visualizing this information in time and space. These Digital Humanities teaching opportunities allow graduate students to diversify and enhance their teaching portfolios, and to document in tangible ways the broad range of skills they develop during their graduate career.

In the words of Amanda Lazarus (PhD Candidate in Art History):

The Wired! Lab has played a pivotal role in my education and professional development at Duke, as it has allowed me to explore new and inspiring approaches to art historical and Digital Humanities research, pedagogy, and collaboration. Having access to and being part of this intellectual community has shown me a different way to be an art historian. Being trained on digital platforms such as Omeka, Neatline, and Airtable has changed the way I approach my research on ancient Greek sculpture and how I present my arguments, while the vertically integrated structure of Wired! research teams has provided me with a rich environment for intellectual and creative collaboration.

Amanda Lazarus with the Building Duke poster at the Bass Connections Showcase, April 17, 2019. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

As a graduate member of the Wired! Lab, I have participated in several projects: Digital Athens, Paris of Waters, and Building Duke. Each has afforded me the opportunity to perform novel research on a variety of topics in Art and Architectural History. In my role of project manager for Building Duke, under the direction of project leaders Sara Galletti, Kristin L. Huffman, and Hannah L. Jacobs, my contributions have focused on mentorship, research, and project outcomes. As the team continues to research and analyze the architectural history of Duke University, I work closely with undergraduate students, training them in digital tools, archival and secondary-source research, and data cataloguing and management. I also help develop intra- and interinstitutional research relationships, and perform research on the university’s landscape architecture.

Other graduate student testimonials also speak to this diversity of professional and intellectual experience. For example, Elizabeth Baltes (PhD 2016) states:

As a graduate student, I was part of the inaugural Wired! course in 2009, as well as several long-term research projects in the Wired! Lab. I never imagined how these experiences would change the trajectory of my research and career. The kinds of digital reconstruction technologies I learned in the Wired! Lab reframed my approach to the material culture of ancient Greece by allowing me to visualize—and question—the ways built landscapes have changed over time. Now a faculty member at Coastal Carolina University, I remain an active member of this vibrant learning community and an advocate for the critical use of digital tools in the service of Humanities research.

In a similar vein, Tim Shea (PhD 2018) reports:

My time in the Wired! Lab was the highlight of my Duke graduate experience. It is hard to replicate the intellectual stimulation and sense of discovery that collaborative work in a place like Wired! generates. Some of my most impactful teaching and learning experiences took place in the lab. My role as project manager of the Digital Athens project was to train students in the fundamentals of GIS through a regular series of tutorials. Our aim was to map the remains of the ancient city of Athens uncovered in large-scale, formal excavations and small rescue excavations throughout the city through georeferenced excavation plans and aerial photography and vector data of the locations of archaeological features.

When I started working in the Wired! Lab, I was considering several possible dissertation topics, but I had yet to finalize my research plan. I went into the Digital Athens project with an open mind and a desire to learn new digital research methods. One of the first tasks that we undertook was to map the find locations of tombstones uncovered in rescue excavations across the city. We began experimenting with GIS and other database platforms, and soon, I had mapped all of the tombstones excavated in the East Cemetery of ancient Athens. This dataset became the foundation of my dissertation research. I fleshed out the dataset to include information from the inscriptions on tombstones, such as whether the deceased was a citizen or immigrant and, if the latter, where they migrated from. I demonstrated that immigrant communities were buried together within the ancient city of Athens and that each group had different preferences for tombstone types that gave each cemetery of Athens its own particular character and appearance. My exposure to digital research methods in the Wired! Lab not only made it possible for me to draw the conclusions I did in my dissertation, but it shaped the very questions that I thought to ask.

Banner Image: Map showing Nazi forced labor construction sites around Kraków. Map created by Antonio LoPiano

MA Students in the Wired! Lab

- Paul B. Jaskot

In addition to the PhD program in Art History, the MA in Digital Art History & Computational Media has become a strong source of intellectual engagement for the Wired! Lab. This program is an example of the kind of dynamic integration of Humanities and computational questions that is a hallmark of our department. Wired! participates fully in this initiative and is a key site for engaging Master’s students in training and mentoring activities. The MA in Digital Art History & Computational Media (originally titled “Historical and Cultural Visualization”) began in 2014 as a logical extension of our integration of undergraduates into Wired! research. Its goal was to be the unique Digital Humanities MA program in the United States specifically focused on art historical and computational media studies questions—with this degree we showcased the rigor of Digital Art History and Visual Culture!

The MA in Digital Art History & Computational Media is an example of the kind of dynamic integration of Humanities and computational questions that is a hallmark of our department.

The program has attracted students from both ends of the spectrum: those with significant digital experience who are looking to integrate these methods with Humanities questions; and those with a deep understanding of Art History and Visual Culture who want to extend their work with computational methods. Such a dynamic mix of experiences and interests means that students learn from one another and push each other in innovative ways. Thus, the MA draws on the same collaborative model and experience that forms the heart of Wired! faculty and staff commitments.

As part of their education, MA students are asked to align themselves with one of the department’s labs, and Wired! has greatly benefited from this experience. From _Digital Athens _to Building Duke to Mapping German Construction, MA students have contributed as part of the team research experience. This means that these students do not merely graduate with their own thesis work, but they also graduate with experiences informed by vertically-integrated teaching and research. In the past few years, MA students have also shifted from being primarily project contributors to becoming core parts of the Wired! mentoring environment.

With recent cohorts, we have engaged a new model of lab assistantship. Christine Liu (MA 2019), Andrea Brucculeri, and Clara Pinchbeck (MA 2020), who have filled this role up to this point, have learned new skills that are helping them in their own work but have also gained important leadership and teaching opportunities, while contributing to the scholarly value of projects. As a result, Wired! offers a crucible of knowledge and experience that helps MA students develop as professionals.

Students do not merely graduate with their own thesis work, but they also graduate with experiences informed by vertically-integrated teaching and research. They have learned new skills that are helping them in their own work but have also gained important leadership and teaching opportunities, while contributing to the scholarly value of projects.

Previous MA students involved with the Wired! Lab have gone on to exciting opportunities that further develop their careers, including work with major firms in the tech industry, internships at major museums, further learning in PhD programs in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and, ultimately, jobs as university professors, among other opportunities.

Banner Image: 3D printed models of Sta. Chiara in Naples. Part of a project studying the historic choir screen. Model by Andrea Basso and Elisa Castagna.

Workshops and Institutes

- Victoria Szabo

From its beginning, the Wired! Lab has engaged with Digital Art History’s development not only through our own research and teaching but also through capacity building across Art History and adjacent disciplines. Within the Duke community we have offered workshops on topics like 3D modeling, interaction design in virtual environments, data visualization, digital mapping, and more—all with an emphasis on how digital tools and methods can be used to enhance the study, creation, and critique of the visual in an arts and humanities context.

As we have explored these topics in our own work, and taught them to others, it is clear to us that digital-spatial, visual, and temporal modalities enable:

- analytic comparisons of prospective, hypothetical, and counterfactual representation of past objects and structures;

- contextual and embedded annotation and citation of primary sources, and explicit, well-documented argumentation and knowledge representation;

- second-order statistical and relational analysis of collections of artifacts and phenomena that help to validate or challenge received historical narratives and hypotheses;

- complex modeling of change over time, whether in terms of architectural morphology, artistic revision, or geographical dispersion.

Central to all of these opportunities is close collaboration and communication of scholarly insights within and across disciplines. These may be effected through shared data and resources, helping to advance the field as a whole. If richly sourced, annotated, and framed content is made available online, the scholarly community can engage in a more ongoing dialogue than is made possible today through written critiques, conference presentations, etc. “Distant viewing” of individual reconstructions, hypotheses, and datasets in turn may facilitate a clearer set of standards and objectives for such work. With such insights in mind, we have extended our collaborative, lab-based approach to partnerships beyond Duke.

Victoria Szabo leading an Omeka workshop at the 2012 summer workshop. Image Credit: Mark J. V. Olson

Initially, our series of workshops, institutes, and tutorials were created to educate our own community around the potential of digital technologies for art historical research. The first Wired! workshop took place in Durham in 2010 and introduced an array of digital practices to local faculty, staff, and students. We repeated this workshop in 2011. From 2012-2016, we worked with advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career faculty in intensive, two-week summer institutes held at Venice International University and focused on specific historical case studies drawn from our shared research in connection with our Visualizing Venice collaborative.

The teaching team (Victoria Szabo, Mark J. V. Olson, Ed Triplett, and Hannah L. Jacobs, not pictured) prepare for the start of the 2016 Venice workshop. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Two of these workshops were supported by the Getty Foundation, with additional support from the Kress Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, and other organizations. Workshop themes included, The Waters of Venice (2012); The Ghetto of Venice (2013 and 2016); The City and the Lagoon (2014); and The Biennale and the City (2015). Two of the most recent introductory workshops, one focused on provisioning the city, the other on the Venetian ghetto, also coincided with major Visualizing Venice exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale.[1] Other workshops featured in-depth, expert-led discussions of historical, technical, and design elements associated with museum-based exhibitions located on-site in Venice and Padua.

The Firenze Scomparsa team at work at the 2018 Advanced Digital Art History workshop. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Throughout these workshops we introduced concepts and methods for Digital Art and Architectural History via hands-on tutorials and collaborative project development; these were based on research materials already collected from the archives by experts in the field. Much of this pedagogical approach has also made its way into our teaching in the MA in Digital Art History & Computational Media, the Art History PhD, and the Computational Media, Art & Cultures PhD programs. We continue to build on these teaching methods through project-based learning around non-Venetian topics as well. Our studies of Duke and Durham, for example, serve as content for courses, workshops open to the broader community, and programs such as the Duke-NCCU Digital Humanities Fellowships.

Throughout these workshops we introduced concepts and methods for Digital Art and Architectural History via hands-on tutorials and collaborative project development; these were based on research materials already collected from the archives by experts in the field.

After five years of success with the Venice-themed summer institutes, we shifted gears towards more advanced topics in Digital Art History and expanded our focus from Visualizing Venice to the more capacious topic of Visualizing Cities, a research direction with broad and deep interest in our extended community. From 2018-2020, and with the generous support of the Getty Foundation, we facilitated the Advanced Topics in Digital Art History 3D: GeoSpatial Networks Summer Institute, again in partnership with our colleagues in Venice and Padua, but this time also enlarging the scope of case studies in question to include those brought by the institute participants themselves.

Participants in the NHC’s Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces Summer Institute visit Duke’s cave environment, the DiVE, Summer 2017. Image Credit: Ashley Maynor

This move occurred in parallel to our broader move towards Visualizing Cities as a core research theme emerging not only among our colleagues in Visualizing Venice (now Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities) but also in the Wired! Lab and in our Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies as a whole. This thematic shift reflects the diverse forms of expertise found within our core group, which includes not only art and architectural historians but also digital media specialists, technologists, and librarians with a shared interest in Digital Visual Studies.

After five years of success with the Venice-themed summer institutes, we shifted gears towards more advanced topics in Digital Art History and expanded our focus from Visualizing Venice to the more capacious topic of Visualizing Cities, a research direction with broad and deep interest in our extended community.

During the institute, we considered the needs of projects that are already well-developed in focus, content, and technical direction, in order to establish a community of practice around an emerging field. In addition to two summer sessions together, this two-year program included monthly virtual meetings and ongoing communications across research teams around technical and conceptual topics. Numerous conference talks, including two panel sessions at the College Art Association annual meetings, multiple research collaborations, grants, and spin-off activities have resulted from this effort so far.

NEH VARDHI participant Micki Kaufman presents her project, Summer 2018. Image Credit: John S. Shelton

During this period, we also led workshops at the National Humanities Center (Summer Institute on Objects, Places, an the Digital Humanities, 2017-2018), and facilitated an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities focused on_ Virtual and Augmented Reality in the Digital Humanities _(2017-2018) and cosponsored by Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Each of these experiences has in turn impacted the ways in which we are reimagining work within and beyond the traditional bounds of Art History and Visual and Media Studies as disciplinary practices.

Building on the success of our most recent summer institutes, we anticipate continuing to foster virtual communities focused on Digital Art History and Visual Culture through future institutes and the Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities collaborative.

Building on the success of our most recent summer institutes, we anticipate continuing to foster virtual communities focused on Digital Art History and Visual Culture through future institutes and the Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities collaborative. We will also continue to focus growing attention on the affordances of emerging media forms for digital scholarship and its communication. Through Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities, we are finding new synergies around such diverse spatio-temporal locales as ancient Athens, early modern Paris, nineteenth-century Durham, H. P. Lovecraft’s imagined early twentieth-century Providence, and mid-twentieth-century Krakow under Nazi occupation. As we consider aesthetic objects and built environments contextualized within and comprising these environments, we are in turn developing innovative methods for the creation and transmission of new knowledge in Art History and Visual and Media Studies. All of these insights will form new city-based case studies for further exploration in our workshops and institutes.

Banner Image: Composite of the historic and present day site of the Venice Biennale with pavilions plotted in purple. Image Credit: Hannah L. Jacobs

Notes

1. Venice, 500 Years of the Ghetto. 2016. Water And Food In Venice. A history of the Lagoon and the City. 2015-2016. ↩︎

Wired! in the DH Landscape at Duke

- Victoria Szabo

Smith Warehouse. Image Credit: Victoria Szabo

The Wired! Lab, now Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, is one of several labs housed in Smith Warehouse and created in association with the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies as part of the interdisciplinary Visual Studies Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation beginning in 2006. Wired! has carved out an identity at Duke as the home for Digital Art History and Visual Culture, foregrounding research questions related to art, architectural, and urban histories, and the ways in which digital tools and methods can be engaged in these areas. Each of the Media Labs has similarly developed its own research mission and focus.

Wired! has carved out an identity at Duke as the home for Digital Art History and Visual Culture, foregrounding research questions related to art, architectural, and urban histories, and the ways in which digital tools and methods can be engaged in these areas.

Aside from its specific, disciplinary objects of inquiry, the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab particularly emphasizes a sustained collaborative, project-based pedagogy as a part of the public-facing expression of team members’ research. As such, it is the primary place at Duke where Digital Humanities and visual arts and cultures intersect in a fully and vertically integrated fashion, as is evidenced by the work our students, faculty, and staff produce and share every semester.

Smith Media Labs logos. Image Credit: Victoria Szabo

Wired! members are actively engaged with the other media labs around best practices for digital tools and methods, most notably around data analysis and visualization with the Duke Art, Law and Markets Lab; virtual and augmented reality with the DiG Digital Archeology Lab and the XR Studio; archives and exhibitions with the Information Science + Studies program; and critical media theories with the Speculative Sensation Lab. In addition, the Wired! Lab has partnered with the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute around research and training initiatives that support students in the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, faculty in the Duke-NCCU Digital Humanities Fellowship program, and colleagues in Duke Libraries.

Digital Humanities Initiative at the Franklin Humanities Institute

Wired! began creating its own workshops in part to address the gap in training opportunities on campus for 3D modeling and mapping, digital methods that address needs within Arts and Humanities disciplines. Through these workshops, we sought to highlight how disciplinary questions and perspectives shape the ways in which such methods and their products are understood and critiqued. These workshops, along with our teaching and research, have brought to light ways in which we can be advocates for Digital Humanities infrastructure at Duke. To that end, Wired! staff and faculty seek out opportunities to engage with these challenges alongside our colleagues in Trinity Technology Services, Duke Libraries, the Office of Information Technology, Digital Learning Innovation, and the Franklin Humanities Institute. These efforts have resulted in the creation of workshops for Responsible Conduct of Research, Bass Connections, and other programs; the proliferation of cross-unit conversations around access, expertise, and support; and the development of policies and tools that our units can invest in to better support Digital Humanities at Duke.

we take to heart the sometimes trenchant critiques of the digital turn in contemporary culture as it impacts questions of equity, access, and inclusion at every level of academic life, as well as the unintentional malformations and constraints new technologies place upon older disciplinary practices.

These aspects of our mission continue as we collectively explore new and emerging technologies such as extended reality, distant reading, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence systems. In the process, we take to heart the sometimes trenchant critiques of the digital turn in contemporary culture as it impacts questions of equity, access, and inclusion at every level of academic life, as well as the unintentional malformations and constraints new technologies place upon older disciplinary practices. Looking ahead, Wired! is eager to continue partnering with our colleagues in Computer Science and Engineering, in Public Policy and Ethics, and in other Arts and Humanities disciplines as we consider how the Digital Humanities can be a site of cross-disciplinary exploration and interdisciplinary invention at Duke.

Banner Image: Panorama of the Duke Chapel by Luca Vascon.

Future Directions

- Kristin L. Huffman

- Hannah L. Jacobs

- Paul B. Jaskot

As this celebratory volume attests, the successes of students, staff, and faculty in the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture have been varied, deep, and meaningful over the past ten years. Such successes lay the groundwork for, and predict, more to come as we expand our scholarly agendas, all the while attending to our fundamental commitment of integrating teaching and research at all levels. For this future, three immediate priorities come to the fore: the development of new collaborative teaching models; the integration of research projects; and the building of community. Attention to each of these aspirations grounds our decision to highlight research as the central unifying term in our new name: the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. These points of emphasis serve as building blocks upon which we can construct a critical approach to the digital analysis of art and visual culture.

three immediate priorities come to the fore: the development of new collaborative teaching models; the integration of research projects; and the building of community.

To begin, we can pick up where our discussion of collaborative teaching left off (see Teaching). In addition to our current practices, there is a need to think more deeply about collaborative teaching not only within our research lab but also within the Humanities as a whole. Universities generally, and Humanities programs specifically, are going through yet another moment of transition in which questions of digital learning have taken center stage. Increasingly, the visual components of the digital are also being addressed as a media-specific point of analysis. In addition, the labor involved in both training students and sustaining research projects has further emphasized how crucial rethinking and extending the collaborative model may be.

MA student Alan Carrillo works with Edward Triplett on a model of the Wawel Castle. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

How can we share teaching modules that, for example, train students to use GIS as a historical digital mapping platform? Conversely, where does the intersection lie in our classes and in our research concerning a shared question of the tension between (humanities) evidence and (computational) data? Is modular teaching a way to address these questions, and, if so, how do we make that argument in an academic environment that institutionally privileges individual labor and pedagogic structures? In sum, to promote critical digital research for Art History and Visual Culture, we must extend our current practices while also addressing the need to rethink them fundamentally in order to be critical in the first place.

How can we share teaching modules that, for example, train students to use GIS as a historical digital mapping platform? Conversely, where does the intersection lie in our classes and in our research concerning a shared question of the tension between (humanities) evidence and (computational) data?

Second, our active research projects (see Project Narratives) point not only to overlapping thematic areas, but also, increasingly, to the possibility of formulating a truly integrated research agenda. This is perhaps best exemplified by the exciting potential for Visualizing Cities as a way of allowing many of our projects to speak to each other (see Visualizing Venice to Visualizing Cities). As a serious agenda, we need to start thinking about overlapping conceptual issues such as how lost architectural and social spaces are imagined/developed and how digital platforms, and their capabilities, may speak to each other in critical ways.

MA Student Anni Yan experiences the augmented reality installation in the Senses of Venice exhibition. Image Credit: Alina Taalman

Can we build a truly comparative analysis of cities? What are the critical questions for this kind of work? Why does it need to engage collaborative work in both the Humanities and computational scholarship? “Interoperability” in this sense points to the multiple potential levels of integration in both digital and humanities terms. In many ways, it can be like the “grand challenges” of the sciences, i.e. a major research goal that is sustained by specific collaborative scholarly projects committed to a shared critical analysis. That is an exciting possibility, one we are eager to take on.

Can we build a truly comparative analysis of cities? What are the critical questions for this kind of work? Why does it need to engage collaborative work in both the Humanities and computational scholarship?

Third, we see that the future holds the possibility of a much greater expansion of our publics through our scholarly output. We have shown over the past decade that we are able to develop and sustain a true learning community; we have also shown that such community has led to public-facing work ranging from mobile applications, to websites, to databases, to exhibitions, to articles and books. But digital and cultural studies are still only at the initial stages of truly addressing broader audiences, both within and without institutions.

Students work with Julia McHugh and Mark J. V. Olson to create a photogrammetric model of a Mesoamerican artifact in the Nasher Museum of Art's permanent collection. Image Credit: J. Caldwell

How, for example, do we engage with questions that are of earnest concern to our students and their post-graduate world? Are we speaking to Black Digital Humanities communities? To Feminist communities? To marginalized communities in general and to questions of access and the digital divide? Why is the digital analysis of art history and visual culture crucial to these publics, too?

digital and cultural studies are still only at the initial stages of truly addressing broader audiences, both within and without institutions. How do we engage with questions that are of earnest concern to our students and their post-graduate world?

Clearly, our current projects overlap with interests of a broad community, addressing as they do themes of gender and ethnicity, class and labor, and power and oppression, among other topics. Yet how can we help be a leader in bringing this work to an academic and non-academic public that is impactful, rigorous, and engaged? There have certainly been individual Wired! projects and outputs that have done just that. Our challenge is now, with a deeper focus on collaboration and research, to extend these project examples and to include broader communities as a whole. That seems very much a challenge worth pursuing in our next decade of work—the next exciting chapter of Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.

Banner Image: Point cloud of the fortress at Monsaraz by Edward Triplett.

Dedication

Faculty for the 2009 Wired! course. From left to right: Rachael Brady, Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila Dillon, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, Mark J. V. Olson. Image Credit: Umberto Plaja

We dedicate this work to the formidable vision of

Caroline Bruzelius

and to our other four colleagues who, with Caroline, taught the first Wired! class:

Rachael Brady, Sheila Dillon, Mark J. V. Olson, and Raquel Salvatella de Prada.

Acknowledgments

We are extraordinarily grateful to all the support we have received over the years without which we would not have prospered as we did. The lab’s initial foundation and ongoing expansion have benefited from many individuals, offices, departments, and units across Duke University’s campus. These have come in the direct form of financial support as well as the generous sharing of immeasurable resources, such as knowledge, equipment, and time. The list below highlights those who contributed to the foundational success of the Wired! Lab and its research initiatives, pedagogical innovation, and opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-doctoral scholars:

- Office of the Provost, Duke University

- Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences as well as the Dean of Humanities, Trinity College, Duke University

- Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department Staff (especially Marion Monson, David Massung, Alina Taalman, and Agnieszka Witczak-Das)

- Duke Global (especially Eve Duffy)

- Undergraduate Research Support Office (especially Sarah Russell and Ron Grunwald)

- Trinity Technology Services, especially:

- Duke East and Smith Warehouse team (especially Antonio Fields and Brad Arthur, as well as former staff including Seth Garrepy, Ted Bebenek, Michal Kozluk, and Bill Broom)

- AV Team (headed by Paul Zylowski)

- Digital Humanities Specialist Brian Norberg

- Senior Associate Dean Edward D. Gomes, Jr.

- David Tremmel in Database Services

- Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, especially: Sarah Schroth, Trevor Schoonmaker, Julia McHugh, Marianne Wardle, Molly Boarati, Brad Johnson, Douglas Vuncannon, and the incredible Nasher staff.

- Duke University Libraries, especially:

- ScholarWorks (David Hansen, Arnetta Girardeau, Paolo Mangiofico, Liz Milewicz, Will Shaw)

- Center for Data and Visualization Sciences (Joel Herndon, Eric Monson, Mark Thomas, and Drew Keener)

- Angela Zoss

- David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library Staff (Naomi Nelson and Andrew Armacost)

- Duke University Library Software Services (Will Sexton, Sean Aery, and Michael Daul)

- Exhibition Services (Margaret (Meg) Brown and Yoon Kim)

- Duke University Research Computing (Mark DeLong)

- John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

- Our colleagues and collaborators over the years at North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

- Our international partners:

- Università Iuav di Venezia

- Venice International University

- Università di Padova

- The American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Funding & Sponsorships

In addition to support across Duke’s campus, the Wired! Lab has received targeted sponsorship and funding for its broader teaching agenda, research projects, and summer workshops. The following lists highlight our gratitude for funding received over the past ten years from an impressive array of both external institutions and granting initiatives at Duke.

External Institutions

- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

- Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)

- Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

- Fondazione di Venezia

- Furthermore Foundation

- The Getty Foundation

- The International Center of Medieval Art

- Samuel H. Kress Foundation

- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

- NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication

- National Humanities Center

- Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)

- Renaissance Society of America

- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Duke University

- Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

- Bass Connections

- Data+

- Duke Digital Initiative

- John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

- Humanities Writ Large Initiative

- Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation

- Nasher Museum of Art

- Office of Information Technology

- Office of the Provost

- Provost Global Online Education Award

- Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts

- Office of the Vice Provost for Research

- Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

- Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

- Office of the Dean of Humanities, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

- Schiff Family Humanities Fund

- Trinity College Research Enhancement Funds

- Trinity Technology Services

- Undergraduate Research Support Office, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

- University Libraries

- Visual Studies Initiative

Contributors

- Caroline Bruzelius

Caroline Bruzelius works on architecture, sculpture, and urbanism in the Middle Ages. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max-Planck Institute (Hertziana Library), and the Fulbright Association. She is former Director of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the Medieval Academy. Bruzelius is co-Director of a database on images of the monuments in the medieval Kingdom of Naples, and is working on two new studies: a book called “The Cathedral and the City,” and a general study of architecture in the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily. She was founding director of the Wired! Lab (2009-2017).

The History of Wired!

An Exemplary Course

- Sheila Dillon

Sheila Dillon received a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She teaches courses on Greek and Graeco-Roman art and archaeology. Her research interests focus on portraiture and public sculpture and on reconstructing the statuary landscape of ancient cities and sanctuaries. Professor Dillon was a member of the Aphrodisias Excavations in Turkey from 1992-2004, has worked at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace, and now spends summers doing fieldwork in Athens. Her current research includes a collaborative project to publish the portrait sculpture from the Excavations in the Athenian Agora with a group of current and former students, and a digital mapping project of the history of the archaeological excavations in the Agora, a collaborative endeavor centered in the Wired! Lab that involves undergraduate and graduate students at Duke.

PhD Students in the Wired! Lab

- Sara Galletti Sara Galletti is an Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History. She received a joint PhD in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from the Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne and the Università IUAV of Venice. Her main field of research and teaching is the history and theory of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architecture in France. Her first book, Le Palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Médicis, 1611-1631, was published by Éditions Picard (Paris, 2012). She is currently working on two projects: (1) Practice into Theory: Philibert Delorme, the Premier Tome de l’Architecture (1567), and the Profession of Architecture in Early Modern France, which analyses the connections between architectural theory and practice in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century France; and (2) Paris of Waters, which focuses on the impact of water on the demographic, social, architectural, and urban development of the city of Paris through time.

- Olga Grlic Olga Grlic is a Project Manager for The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database. She received her MA and PhD degrees in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her undergraduate degrees were in French and Spanish from University of Zagreb, Croatia. From 2014 to 2016 she was Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has published on Dante and made numerous translations from French to English. Her interest in the Norman Kingdom of Sicily arose from working on representations of castles in chivalric literature in Old French, and on cultural contacts between Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Crusader states in the twelfth century.

- Kristin L. Huffman

Kristin Love Huffman is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. Her current research focuses on the uses, configurations, and, at times, deliberate re-ordering of architectural spaces and larger urban systems in early modern Venice. Her interest in urban experiences and reconstructing transformed or demolished spaces led her to work with Wired! at Duke as well as Visualizing Venice beginning in 2013. From 2014-2017, she worked to create the exhibition, A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1500 on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke (September 2017-January 2018). She is currently working with colleagues at the Correr Museum in Venice, Italy, to feature an expanded version of the 2017-2018 exhibition, A Portrait of Venice, as an installation centered on the woodcut along with the original wooden blocks used to publish the View in 1500.

A New Lab Model for Art History & Visual Culture

Research Initiatives & Outreach

Future Directions

- Hannah L. Jacobs

Hannah L. Jacobs provides instruction and conducts research in digital concepts and tools for Wired! courses and projects. She leads tutorials and workshops, collaborates with faculty to develop and implement digital humanities projects in the classroom, consults on faculty research, offers advising on digital tools for undergraduate and Master’s student theses, provides technical support for lab projects, and liaises with other digital humanities staff at Duke. Hannah holds an MA in Digital Humanities from King's College London (2013) and a BA in English/Theatre from Warren Wilson College (2011). She is currently pursuing an MS in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018-present). She is interested in challenges of conducting and representing historical research via data and visualization; project management in Digital Humanities; applications of digital technologies in Humanities pedagogies; and potentials of visual interactive storytelling for scholarly communications, public outreach, and education.

Collaborative Teaching

Future Directions

- Paul B. Jaskot

Paul B. Jaskot came to Duke in 2017 after many years of involvement with Digital Art History. He specializes in the history of modern German architecture and art, with a particular interest in the political history of architecture before, during, and after the Nazi era. He has also published on Holocaust Studies topics more broadly, modern architecture including the history of Chicago architecture, and methodological essays on Marxist art history. Paul has also been deeply involved in Digital Art History issues since 2007, both as a scholar and as an advocate. In this role, he has been part of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international team of scholars that has been exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze central problems in the spatial history of the Holocaust, including issues rising from the built environment. The Wired! project teams of Mapping German Construction and Mapping Occupied Krakow extend and complement this work. With Wired!, Jaskot is also part of the Dictionary of Art Historians team, as well as the Visualizing Cities collaborative.

Introduction

Objects

Scale

Curriculum

MA Students in the Wired! Lab

Future Directions

- Mark J. V. Olson

Mark J. V. Olson is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual & Media Studies at Duke University. He collaborates on the development of a new interdisciplinary project that connects the study of the material culture of Art History, Architecture, and Archaeology with new media modes of representation and visualization. Olson is the former Director of New Media & Information Technologies for HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences & Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies.

The History of Wired!

Objects

- Lee Sorensen Lee Sorensen received his graduate degrees in art history and library science both from The University of Chicago. He served as the consultant for art historians for the Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography (1994). Professionally he served twice on the executive board of the Art Libraries Society of North America as well as that society's web administrator for a similar time. For more than a score of years he has been art reference librarian and bibliographer at Duke University. He currently serves on the advisory board for Oxford University Press’ Oxford Art Online.

- Victoria Szabo

Victoria Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Graduate Faculty in Computational Media Arts & Cultures, and affiliated with Innovation & Entrepreneurship. She is also the Program Director for Information Science + Information Studies, the Director of Graduate Studies for the MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media, and the Director of the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute as well as Co-Director of the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. She is co-lead of the Bass Connections Information, Society & Culture theme. Her interests are in digital media and cultures, in theory and in practice, with special attention to media history and its impact on received understandings of the past, and the ways in which critical engagement with new media and information technologies can transform our understandings of history, art, and culture. Her current projects focus on spatial and augmented reality technologies such as interactive maps, virtual worlds, games, and hybrid reality systems, and how they can be applied to humanities teaching and research.

Spaces & Systems

Workshops and Institutes

Wired! in the DH Landscape at Duke

- John J. Taormina

John J. Taormina received his BA in Art History from John Carroll University and MA in Art History from George Washington University. From 1982-1999, he was head of the visual resources/image collections at George Washington University, Oberlin College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan. Since 2000 Taormina has been the curator of visual resources in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke. As the head of the Visual Media Lab at Duke, he oversees all aspects of the extensive digital and analog image collections. He also manages the department’s communication program and the department’s exhibition spaces in Smith Warehouse. Taormina has been the metadata and image consultant to the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project since its inception in 2011. In 2015, he co-organized with Caroline Bruzelius the Wired! symposium, “Apps, Maps & Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies.” Since 2018, he has been part of the Building Duke Bass Connections project team. After three years of research, John published his 150-page Digital Humanities Bibliography in 2019, with ongoing revisions and additions.

The History of Wired!

- Edward Triplett

Ed Triplett received a PhD in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia in 2015. He also has an MFA in 3D Modeling and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design, and an MA in History & Museum Studies from the University of Delaware. His dissertation focused on fortress-monasteries and castles occupied by Iberia’s military-religious orders, and he continues pursuing his two main interests: medieval architecture and historical and cultural visualization. Ed teaches courses on historical mapping, medieval castles, and Gothic cathedrals. He is working on a book manuscript about the role castles played in the formation of borders in Medieval Iberia. Ed originally came to Duke as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow tasked with data curation for visual studies in 2015, and he continues to work with the Wired! Lab and other digital scholarship groups on campus. His collaborative digital project seeks to spatially reconstruct The Book of Fortresses–a bound collection of perspective drawings and plans of 58 castles on the border between the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain in 1509-1510.

Spaces & Systems

- Augustus Wendell Augustus Wendell, Assistant Professor of the Practice, researches the application of digital spatial modeling and analysis in historical studies. He brings several decades of experience in the modeling and simulation of complex spaces to the lab. On the Building Duke project he is working with students on the creation and programming of an interactive 3D model of the Duke University historical development. Both Deconstructing Urban Visions: Computational Analysis of Aerial Engravings and Modeling Agency: Historical Agent Based Modeling feature the ongoing development of originally programmed 3D spatial analysis tools. Augustus enjoys overlapping the orbit of computational humanist inquiry with students of Computer Science and Mathematics. He has an MFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts and a BS from Northeastern University. Augustus has also held appointments at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Parsons the New School for Design, The New York School of Interior Design and Virginia Tech.

jpg— title: Student Testimonials of their Lab Experiences short_title: Student Testimonials subtitle: weight: 6 type: splash image: figures/Testimonials-KoS-Jules+Brenden.png

The proof of the Wired! Lab’s—the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab’s—success is visible in its testimonials. The students have recounted the impact the lab’s innovative research-teaching model has had on their academic careers, future goals, and career development.

The Wired! Lab is unlike any other space I have encountered on Duke’s campus. When I first came to Duke as a freshman, I found one of my first communities amongst researchers, professors, and students devoted to the work that they do at the Wired! Lab. Each time I would come to work, I found myself engaged in fascinating conversations about new research theories and ways to reimagine how research has been done before. While Art History may not be my final career destination, the skills I have gained with the Dictionary of Art Historians have completely transformed my Duke experience.

~ Kerry Rork, Duke ’22
Major in History and Political Science
Undergraduate Fellow with Dictionary of Art Historians

The Wired! Lab has really taught me how Digital Humanities can help people see the past in a way they might not have otherwise. […] The Wired! Lab has been a home away from home for me.

~ Jessica Williams, Duke ‘19
Major in Art History, Minors in Political Science and Psychology
Undergraduate Fellow with The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database

I love coming in on Fridays and seeing everyone working and everyone talking and having that sense of camaraderie; seeing how different groups can use the same tools to tell different stories.

~ Evangeline Marecki, Duke ‘19
Majors in Classical Languages and Computer Science
Undergraduate Fellow with Digital Athens

The amount of guidance that I have received from professors, PhD students, and just sitting in the room hearing all the collaboration happening—that’s just something that you can’t pick up in a classroom.

~ Andrew Lin, Duke ‘19
Majors in Economics and History
Undergraduate Fellow with A Portrait of Venice, Building Duke, and Paris of Waters

…being in that lab, where all of these different research projects are going on. It’s a really interesting dynamic, and, I think, very unique on this campus.

~ Mary Kate Weggeland, Duke ‘19
Major in Art History, Concentration in Museum Theory and Practices, Minor in French Studies
Undergraduate Fellow with A Portrait of Venice and Senses of Venice

The most meaningful aspect of working in the lab has been finding that there are ways to combine different disciplines that I love in a really meaningful way.

~ Annie Haueter, Duke ‘17
Major in Computer Science, Minor in Art History
Undergraduate Fellow with A Portrait of Venice

The research skills I’ve gained by working on the Kingdom of Sicily project and access to librarians […] and the vast resources through Duke Libraries, I’ve learned how to conduct searches, […] how to organize metadata, and to conduct a professional and reproducible search through vast amounts of information that would have totally overwhelmed me before.

~ Michael O’Sullivan, Duke ‘17
Major in Psychology, Minor in Classics
Undergraduate Fellow with The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database

Banner Image: Jules Nasco and Brenden Li, Undergraduate Fellows with The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database study an image for the database. Image Credit: Alina Taalman.