Caroline Bruzelius head and shoulders portrait.

Caroline Bruzelius Elected to the American Philosophical Society

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May 21, 2020

John Taormina

Caroline A. Bruzelius, Anne Murnick Cogan Professor Emerita of Art and Art History and inaugural director of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture, has been elected a Member of the prestigious American Philosophical Society. Thirty-four Members were elected this year, including others in the humanities such as Elizabeth Alexander, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Marin Alsop, Music Director, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Lonnie Bunch III, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution; Carla Hayden, Librarian, Library of Congress; David W. Oxtoby, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and André Watts, Pianist and Distinguished Professor of Music, Indiana University.

The American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” The Society sustains its mission in four principal ways. It honors and engages distinguished scientists, humanists, social scientists, and leaders in civic and cultural affairs through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship, particularly in the semi-annual Meetings in Philadelphia. It supports research and discovery through grants and fellowships, lectures, publications, prizes, exhibitions, and public education. It serves scholars through a research library of some 13 million manuscripts and other collections internationally recognized for their enduring scholarly value.

The American Philosophical Society’s current activities reflect the founder’s spirit of inquiry, provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas, and convey the conviction of its members that intellectual inquiry and critical thought are inherently in the public interest.

Early Members included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall.  In the nineteenth century, John James Audubon, Robert Fulton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, and Louis Pasteur were among those elected.  Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, and George Marshall hint at the scientific, humanistic, and public accomplishments of 20th-century Members.  The first woman was elected in 1789 – the Russian Princess Dashkova, president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. 

Today the Society has 1,051 elected Members, 852 resident Members and 169 international Members from more than two dozen foreign countries. Only 5,715 Members have been elected since 1743. Since 1900, more than 260 Members have received the Nobel Prize. 

(Digital) Art History at CAA 2020

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February 12, 2020 — February 15, 2020
Chicago, IL

Here are a few of the Duke- and digital art history-related presentations happening this week at the College Art Association’s annual conference:

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

What is Lurking Underneath Notre Dame’s Roof? Visual Heritage and VR Ethics in the Digital Age

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C – Yellow Table

Host: Vasile Prejmerean

Hands-On to Eyes-On: From Material Collections to Digital Exhibitions

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Wilford C

Visual Resources Association (VRA)

Chair: Bridget Madden – University of Chicago

Presentations:

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks

8:30 AM – 10:00 AM | Hilton Chicago – 8th Floor – Lake Ontario

Chair: Victoria E. Szabo – Duke University

Discussant: Edward Triplett – Duke University

Presentations:

Beyond the Algorithm: Art Historians, Librarians, and Archivists in Collaboration on Digital Humanities Initiatives

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Hilton Chicago – 8th Floor – Lake Ontario

Art Libraries Society of North America

Chairs: Maggie Joe Mustard – The New Museum of Contemporary Art

Amye McCarther – New Museum

Presentations:

Creating Digital Humanities Projects in Art and Art History

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C-8

Workshop Leader: Anthony F. Mangieri – Salve Regina University, Newport, RI

Anthony F. Mangieri is Associate Professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Women’s Studies program at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Emory University. Mangieri is the author of Virgin Sacrifice in Classical Art: Women, Agency, and the Trojan War (Routledge).

Workshop Details: This workshop offers participants a “road map” of how to create their own digital humanities projects. Topics to be covered include conceptualizing, implementing, and maintaining digital projects, and the tools to create them. Group activities provide opportunities for brainstorming and idea building that will help participants conceptualize their own projects.

From Knowledge to Data in Art History

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C-7

Workshop Leaders: Nancy A. Um – Binghamton University

Nancy Um is Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.

Stephen Whiteman – The Courtauld Institute of Art

Stephen Whiteman is Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Lauren Cesiro

Workshop Details:

In this workshop, we will discuss the process of understanding art historical research materials as data, working with the software Tableau. It is aimed at art history faculty and graduate students who do not possess experience working with humanities datasets, but wish to visualize or map aspects of their research.

This workshop is a hands-on session. All participants should bring their laptops, fully charged. Please download software and documents before arriving at the session. Information about software downloads, equipment, and other workshop preparation can be found here: http://nancyum.com/caa-2020-workshop-from-knowledge-to-data-in-art-history/

Lost in Translation: Early Modern Global Art History and the Digital Humanities

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM | Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Wilford C

Digital Art History Society

Chairs: Meredith J. Gill – University of Maryland

Paul B. Jaskot – Duke University

Presentations:

Friday, February 14, 2020

Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Lower Level Lobby

Chair: Alexa K. Sand – Utah State University

Presentations:

Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations(Part 2)

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Lower Level Lobby

Chair: Alexa K. Sand – Utah State University

Presentations:

Lines of Flight, Lines of Sight: Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Flying Carpets

Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Lower Level Lobby

Presenter: Jess Chen – Duke University

Session: Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations(Part 2)

Mapping Social and Spatial Encounters in Eighteenth-Century Venice

Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Wilford C

Presenter: Noah Scott Michaud – Wired! Lab

Session: Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations(Part 2)

Political History of Prisons: The Architecture of People in Raleigh’s Central Penitentiary

Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Lower Level Lobby

Presenter: Paloma J Rodney – Duke’s Wired! Lab

Session: Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations

A Self-Defined Sex Being: Self Portraiture as Black Feminist Fantasy for the Purpose of Black Feminist Liberation

Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Lower Level Lobby

Presenter: Ashleigh Cheryl Elizabeth Smith – Duke University

Session: Undergraduate Research and Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History – Poster Presentations

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Digital Art History and the Getty Vocabularies

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM | Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C-8

Digital Art History Society

Workshop Leaders: Anne L. Helmreich – Getty Research Institute

Anne Helmreich is Associate Director for Digital Initiatives in the Getty Research Institute and is engaged with the intersection of art history and the digital humanities.

Patricia A. Harpring – Getty Research Institute

Patricia Harpring is Managing Editor for the Getty Vocabularies, expert in standards and documenting art and architecture for research and discovery.

Workshop Details: Today, art historians have unprecedented access to digitized resources and approaches. Working in this arena requires structured and standardized data, making the Getty Vocabularies essential resources. In this workshop, learn more about the Getty Vocabularies, how they can advance scholarship, and how to use the new OpenRefine Vocabulary Reconciliation Service.

Additional digital art history events are listed on the International Journal of Digital Art History blog.

Art of the Americas Exhibit Opening in Nasher Museum

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February 1, 2020 — May 31, 2020
Nasher Museum of Art

The Nasher Museum of Art will be showcasing Cultures of the Sea: Art of the Ancient Americas from February 1 to May 31, 2020 in the Incubator Gallery.

For ancient cultures on the Central and South American coasts, the ocean was both a source of livelihood and a way of life: It provided food, precious materials and divine inspiration in regions with often-severe environmental conditions. Cultures of the Sea: Art of the Ancient Americas brings together diverse artworks from 100 BCE to 1550 CE that illustrate how the ocean shaped the cultural legacies of these civilizations. This exhibition features ceramics, textiles and carvings, many on view for the first time, from the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection. More information can be found about this collection on the Nasher Museum’s website.

Additionally, there will be a Gallery Talk about the collection on February 6 from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Nasher Museum. This will be followed by a reception.

Cultures of the Sea will also be available for spotlight tours on February 16 from 2-3 p.m. Spotlight Tours come free with admission and allow visitors to enjoy art at a slower pace. During these tours, a gallery guide will lead a 30-45 minute discussion on just one piece of art.

Regular guided tours are offered twice weekly, Thursdays at 6 PM (free) and Sundays at 2 PM (free with admission). Tours last approximately one hour.

NEH Awards DH Advancement Grant to Triplett and Stern

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Durham, N.C.

Andrea Brucculeri

Co-directors Edward Triplett and Philip Stern received a $99,339 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) last Tuesday. The grant will be used to advance their project, “The Sandcastle Workflow: A Malleable System for Visualizing Pre-Modern Maps and Views.”

The NEH announced $30.9 million to support 188 humanities projects and an additional $48 million for community programs at state councils. Triplett’s project was one of 14 projects to receive a digital humanities advancement grant.

Triplett says the decision to apply for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) grant originally grew out of his and Stern’s mutual interests in premodern maps and views, and in experimenting with new ways of analyzing them. The Sandcastle Workflow emerged through Triplett’s Wired Lab project which has been mapping and modeling fortresses and landscapes that appear in a 16th-century Portuguese volume of drawings known as the “Livro das Fortalezas” (or Book of Fortresses). The purpose of the NEH funding is to refine the methods begun in the Book of Fortresses project and make them available to other scholars studying similar images that cannot be georeferenced on top of a modern map.

Triplett and Stern agree that most mapping tools are strict and logical, and don’t account for the ambiguity and messiness of humanities’ resources. Triplett says this is why he and Stern decided to use the Book of Fortresses project to “streamline the process of deconstructing and reassembling these place-based images in a more malleable environment – one where the ‘control’ in our experiment was not a modern basemap.” This is where the title “Sandcastle Workflow” name came from — the unbridled malleability of sand, as well as Triplett’s research on medieval and early modern castles

“I have been working on archaeological reconstruction, HGIS, and other 3D geospatial projects for a long time, and I have wanted to head a project like this since I was in graduate school, so this is a very exciting time for me,” Triplett said. “I know Phil shares that excitement as well.” 

Stern is Gilhuly Family professor in the History Department. He is currently working on projects related to the British Empire. 

Triplett is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. In 2015 he joined the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and has been teaching courses in GIS mapping for historical subjects the design of Medieval castles, monasteries and cathedrals.

“I have had a team of 4-5 students, some of whom graduated last year, working on Fridays at the lab over the last two and a half years, and we have really done a lot with the time and money at our disposal,” Triplett said. Current student researchers working with Triplett include Daniel Castro, Cyan DeVeaux, Hillman Han, and Audrey Magnuson.

While the Sandcastle Workflow will focus more strictly on the arguments and spatial practices embedded in premodern maps and views, the Book of Fortresses project will continue to also gather dense 3D of the fortresses in its original source. With the help of Tim Senior, independent scholar and long-time Wired! Lab affiliate, and former student Stone Mathers, Triplett has spent parts of the summer in 2018 and 2019 traveling in Portugal and gathering this data through a process called photogrammetry.

“Thanks to financial assistance from the Digital Humanities Initiative at Duke headed by my colleague Victoria Szabo, we purchased a small drone with a mounted camera that we flew over the castles last June and July and ended up with some fantastic 3D data that has helped us compare the drawings in the Book of Fortresses to the architectural remains of the sites,” Triplett said. This data will be added into the Unity3D game engine as a way of pushing the Sandcastle Workflow forward, and a “point-cloud” version of the data can be seen on the project website at www.bookoffortresses.org.

“The Sandcastle Workflow is the methodology we are pushing forward with help from the NEH, but there is an even larger related effort to put these methods into practice right away,” Triplett said. “We also recently received funding from Bass Connections that has allowed us to create a project-based course around this subject next year, and we are currently recruiting for a summer Data+ team to help build a dataset from additional maps and views that will feed into the Bass Connections project.”


Projects

Book of Fortresses