How Might This Apply to Art History?

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The theme of discussion and the readings for last week have brought about two questions for me. First, John Markoff’s cahiers case study illustrates a method for how they were able to overcome gaps in archival records, but how might this apply to ephemeral art objects that are no longer extent? Secondly, how might art historians who prioritize objects apply critical search, outlined by Guldi, to their search for images/objects to support research?

Both of these questions emerge from a tension that I have been experiencing and a larger question that I have been asking myself throughout the semester: as an art historian, what is my “data?” It is easy for me to just set aside the visual and material objects that I am working with and say that my data is the primary and secondary sources that I am using to frame my narrative or interpretation of the objects. However, that answer seems, at the very least, incomplete because I use those sources only as supporting evidence for what I am seeing in the objects themselves, and often I’m also using other artworks alongside the textual sources as support for my claims. The characteristics of the visual and material objects are as much my data as the textual sources that I deal with.

This is a particularly challenging reality when the objects that would be useful for supporting my claims no longer exist because textual descriptions of these objects often cannot articulate precisely enough the formal characteristics of the art object to support visual claims. Ekphrasis is often useful for establishing the existence of an object, but knowledge of its existence is insufficient for many visual arguments. This contrasts with the case study presented by John Markoff in which knowledge of the existence of cahiers was enough to begin to make larger historical claims.

In my own research, I often come up against this when dealing with Eucharistic devotion in 16th- and 17th-century Rome. During the period, Eucharistic devotion often centered around what are described as elaborate and theatrical stages on which a monstrance was placed to display the Eucharist for worshippers. These stages, though they often were designed by leading artists of the period, were ephemeral. They were dismantled after the event was completed. From the textual descriptions, I can make historical claims about these ephemeral works. I can, however, say very little art historically about them because I can’t see them. When drawings or prints illustrating these backdrops are extent, I can then begin to make visual arguments and hypothesize about how they might relate visually to other artworks.

The second question emerged for me out of the Guldi reading because I often find quite time consuming to find images (or more generally art objects) that support the arguments of my research. These objects (data) exist but are not often able to be found with a quick search. Part of the reason for this in my case is that I deal largely with artwork in situ or more generally smaller architectural spaces, such as chapels. For my current research project, I am finding that I actually have to find interior pictures of each of the Baroque churches in Rome and virtually walk through them to find the data I need. It would be amazing to be able to apply a sort of Guldian critical search method to find these objects and supporting material, but I can’t quite envision how that might work. I wonder if I might open this up to the class to see if others, especially those who deal material culture, have thought about how critical search might be adapted for visual sources. Any thoughts?

Social Media, Content Moderation, and Agency

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A couple of years ago, a friend shared with me this article by former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris. Although it is somewhat alarmist with regard to social media, as is his website advocating for more “human” tech design, the readings and discussion last week on platforms and content moderation that called into question the control over what content is stored and presented brought to mind the sorts of discussions Harris’s article is engaged with. His basic premise is that social media platforms, not only by what content they choose to make available but also by their very design, are taking away the agency of those who engage with them. In other words, he argues that these platforms are designed to moderate and alter both what content we have access to and also what content we want access to.

Although I waver back and forth a bit, at times feeling his alarmism more strongly than others, I find that I do basically agree with Harris’s argument that the content moderation at the design level of these platforms has a not insignificant impact on our agency by working to alter our psychological desires for certain content. I find this moderation of what content we want access to even more problematic than the sorts of “censoring” described by Gillespie and Roberts because at some level it impacts whether or not we even care or notice that certain content is missing or censored.

In the current plague state, I am finding this more wearying. Many of us are spending significantly more time on our computers and social media platforms looking to be fed more information both about the pandemic and about anything other than the pandemic. Social media platforms have been feeding us a false sense of control over what content we are sharing and accessing and, in a time when we are feeling a lack of control, we are leaning into the perceived control granted us by social media.

But, I think many of us are feeling the tension between desiring more and more content and recognizing that we don’t know what information we can trust. We are realizing that more information doesn’t necessarily give us more control over the situation. I hope this tension will lead us to a more thoughtful engagement with these platforms so that we can prevent our agency from being so easily usurped by those who actually have control over the content moderation and we can better advocate for access to more inclusive content.

WHG and Recogito

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1. WHG

a) I searched for a few different places in WHG and found the results to be pretty much what I expected, but there were a couple of interesting things which emerged for me. First, I searched for my home town, “Beaver Dam, WI” and no results were returned. When I searched for just “Beaver Dam,” 63 results emerged including 3 that relate to my town. All of the results were in the United States, including one in Alaska. It hadn’t been in the forefront of my mind that that would be the case, but of course that is true. It was also fun to see the density of dots correspond to places where one is likely to find beavers (or would have been likely to find beavers at one point in time).

I next searched more specifically for the rural township of approximately 1400 people where my family now lives, “Westford.” 8 results were returned, all in the Eastern United States and none corresponding to the town in Wisconsin.

I then switched gears and searched for “Rome” which returned 67 results with just 3 in Italy. I thought I would try to look more broadly for “Lazio” the region of Italy in which Rome resides, and the region did not appear. However, when I searched for “Tuscany,” another region, it does appear. It seemed an interesting discrepancy.

b) I wasn’t able to create a dataset to practice contributing data. Instead, I got an error message:

2. Recogito

b) I uploaded an article by Fabio Barry on marble floors in the early Modern Mediterranean. When I converted into text format, it was much longer than I expected, so I only annotated a few pages of it and found the process quite tedious. I also realized after I had gone through and annotated all place names in those pages, that I needed to be more selective when doing so because including countries actually just diffused the information.

In all, I found the mapping not particularly illuminating. It seemed to reveal an obvious premodern Mediterranean world and to present this world with a certain stasis that doesn’t really speak to the ideas of mobility and exchange of materials in the article. Perhaps, if I continued to annotate the document, it would begin to reveal interesting connections which don’t yet jump out!

Carolyn Walker Bynum’s “Why All the Fuss about the Body”

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I chose to examine just one article and it’s citation’s network: Bynum, Carolyn Walker. “WHY ALL THE FUSS ABOUT THE BODY, A MEDIEVALIST’S PERSPECTIVE.” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 1-33.

It pulled up 130 citing articles with a total of 683 times cited. H-index is 16. It’s number of citations has steadily grown from it publication in 1995 to its peak in 2012 with 64 citations that year. With the exception of 2014, when it had just 45 citations, it has remained around 60 citations per year through 2019.

Bibliographic Coupling by Country, Overlay Visualization

Bibliographic Coupling by Author, Network Visualization

Bibliographic Coupling by Document, Network Visualization

Citation by Author, Density Visualization

Citation by Documents, Density Visualization

Citation by Source, Density Visualization

What can you learn from the bibliometric network you have created?

I created a variety of networks from this data but, for the most part, I’m not finding the information they are providing all that useful. From the bibliographic coupling networks by author and by country, I’m able to see that the majority of the articles are coming from the US, the UK, and Canada, and from a pretty close-knit scholarly group with a handful of outliers. The density visualizations of citation networks by author and documents give us a couple of authors and articles who cite densely Bynum’s article. Perhaps, the most interesting density visualization was the citation network by source which highlighted for me, among the many medieval journals, two interesting hot spots: American Anthropologist and Eighteenth-Century Studies. When I looked back at the data in the Web of Science citation report, however, I realized that the visualization was actually misleading (or at least the screenshot of it) because, although there were 7 articles from American Anthropologist that cited Bynum, there were 14 from the Cambridge Archeological Journal (which I can’t see in the visualization) and 11 in Environmental History (which barely stands out in the network). There were 3 articles from Eighteenth-Century Studies, which is the same number as in Speculum (a source that doesn’t stand out at all in the visualization).

How does your choice of data limit your analysis?

My analysis is obviously limited because of Web of Science’s limited resources for humanities scholarship. By choosing to take data for one article, I’m also working with a rather small data set.

How can you structure your data to change your analysis?

My data set includes self-citations—removing those self-citations would change my analysis slightly. I also did not examine text networks, which I suspect would give me a broader picture of the citations than I would expect.

Useful? Not really

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Rice, Louise. “Urban VIII, the Archangel Michael, and a Forgotten Project for the Apse Altar of St Peter’s.” The Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1072 (1992): 428-34. Accessed February 10, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/885200

Step 1)

What is the total number of citations? 6

What can you learn about the number of citations to this article per year since it was published? 2 years had 2 citations (2001, 2017), 2 years had 1 citation (1997, 1998)…but I don’t understand where the years are coming from because they don’t correspond to publication dates of the articles that are citing it. 

What can you learn about who cites this article?  What are their disciplinary identifications? 4 art historians cite the article, 1 Milton scholar (maybe? I wasn’t able to actually find the citation.)

Step 2)

What is the total number of publications? 7

What is the H-index? 2

What are the average citations per item? 1.86

Which of these numbers would you prefer to have used in evaluations for hiring and tenure?  Why? If I’m Louise Rice, number of publications. If I’m looking for impact on scholarship, probably H-index. None of these number seem particularly useful for hiring or tenure because they don’t actually provide a real representation of anything in this case.

Is this kind of analysis appropriate for all academic fields? Why or why not? I had a really difficult time even finding any of the articles that I thought were influential in my field in this database (this was the 7th article I tried), so I don’t feel that it is providing me with an accurate representation of the impact of the scholarship on my field. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of art historical scholarship is published in monographs or in edited volumes rather than in the journals that would appear in this database. I imagine this is true for a lot of humanities scholarship.

Female Heads of Household

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I decided to do a bit a research to see what data I could easily access regarding women as heads of households across the globe. I was interested to see what countries I could find data for and in particular if the development status of a country had an effect on whether or not women were heads of household. I was also interested to see what other factors I could find data for connected with this information, such as whether I could find data on race, marriage status, parental status, employment, household income, education, or age. Lastly, I was curious if I would be able to find enough data to examine change over time.

I came across three sources for data, in addition to several scholarly articles synthesizing data on US female headed households (FHHs) and race which I didn’t examine beyond titles. The three main sources that I found were “Women’s Health USA 2012” (https://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa12/pc/pages/hc.html), The World Bank’s “DataBank” (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.HOU.FEMA.ZS), and a data booklet published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), entitled “Household Size and Composition Around the World 2017” (https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/household_size_and_composition_around_the_world_2017_data_booklet.pdf). Each of these presented the average percentage of FHHs by country. The data they provided was too limited to indicate change over time. In many cases this was because they only had data for one year. I was at times able to see statistics from two or three years for one country, but it was still insufficient for making larger claims about change over time.

One of these three main sources dealt only with data for the United States and so was unhelpful for examining gender inequality across the world. Nevertheless, “Women’s Health USA 2012,” which uses US Census data from 2011 and included correlating statistics for race and age, did include a definition of FHHs that helped to point out to me ways in which such definitions could vary drastically from country to country. For this source, women as heads of household are defined as having children or other family members living with them and no spouse living with them. This includes single moms, single women with a parent or other relative living in their home, and “women with other household compositions.” But, it does not include single women who live alone, women who are the primary source of income for their family, nor women who self-identify as head of household even for census or tax purposes. I was somewhat surprised by this definition because I wasn’t expecting it to be tied to single status and yet not include single women living alone, nor was I expecting that women who identified in the census as head of household didn’t count in these statistics if they had a male spouse living in their house.

The second main source of data regarding FHHs, The World Bank, provided very limited data but for a greater number of (largely, if not entirely, developing) countries. Although data from 77 countries from between 1990 and 2016 was included, there was only data for one year for many of the countries and there was not data for all of these countries for the same year. In addition, the only data I could find simply indicated percentage of FHHs by country. The bits of narrative detail the website provided indicated that there is also correlated data regarding societal pressures or economic changes that seemed to produce an increase in FHHs in developing countries more than cultural patterns, but it doesn’t provide further details. Similarly, the narrative details also indicate differences in marital statuses of FHHs between developing and developed countries without providing the data. Lastly, it indicates that this data is of particular interest for The World Bank because of the information it can provide related to “feminization of poverty – the process whereby poverty becomes more concentrated among Individuals living in female-headed households” and yet there is no mention of data related to poverty supplied here.

The last of these sources, DESA, only tangentially provides data on FHHs. The main concern of this data booklet is household size. However, it does provide two graphs. One contains information about FHHs by continent. The other adds to that information by also providing data about the parental status of FHHs.

Overall, my sense is that the data for examining gender inequality in relation to the role of women as heads of household is somewhat limited. My sense is that this is largely the result of vastly different definitions of FHHs which makes gathering the data not particularly useful or easy. I sensed that this might be a problem I would run up against when I looked at the definition provided by the first source I mentioned. The narrative details provided by The World Bank’s site also indicates that these varying definitions were highly problematic for their analysis of the data.

Interpretation/Reliability of Data

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From my overachieving years in Model UN as a high school student, I’m familiar with SDGs and the impossibility of actually enacting change through multinational organizations such as those that make up the UN. But, I haven’t thought much (or at least not recently) about access to data for measuring compliance and progress toward meeting the goals. This was the most unfamiliar aspect of our conversations this week. The science and politics that together have to go into accounting for the data received is immensely frustrating because of the lack of reliability which that combo seems to produce. How much can we really trust the data passed along by individual countries to measure progress toward SDGs?

What is even more intriguing is thinking about how those who are compiling the data are making judgments about what the data is actually telling them in order to determine compatibility from country to country. Just trying to wrap my mind around what that process might look like is creating thoroughly complex equations in my head which I don’t have the tools to solve. And yet it is also pointing to a soft side of statistical analysis which is perhaps more closely related to the humanities than the hard sciences. Those working with the data received from country to country are in a sense having to make judgements about the countries’ motivations for presenting data in certain ways, about what the data is really revealing. They aren’t just dealing with concrete numbers. This is in a sense obvious, and yet we often don’t treat data in this way at first glance. Or do we?

Inclusivity?

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Last year, when I was helping a little bit with the metadata for the manuscripts included on the Italian Paleography website at the Newberry, which I mentioned earlier, I was laughing a little bit at how specific some of the Library of Congress subject headings were and how lacking in specificity were others. As I was trying to categorize some items from Catholic Renaissance Italy, I was seeing just how obvious it was that the subject headings were created by White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. Of course, this bias is relatively very minor compared with others brought up in the chapter we read by Safiya Umoja Noble and in the other writings pointing out the place of bias in the categorization of data. But, I mention it because, despite the fact that all of us who were working on the project were seeing the limitations of using the Library of Congress subject headings, we kept using that categorization because it allowed the project to maintain a certain level of standardization that makes it useful and compatible with other databases. And so, it reveals in a very minor way why it can be difficult to get away from faulty systems of data categorization riddled with problematic ideologies in order to create a totally inclusive space in the digital humanities. It seems like there would need to be a broad and, more or less, simultaneous overhaul of these “standard” systems in order to really make an impact.

Several of the articles we have read have highlighted localized efforts to more inclusively handle data, but I am finding it an unsatisfactory solution and am having difficulty putting my finger on why. I think part of it is that these localized efforts seem to have a way of segregating data. For example, the types of projects dealing with Indigenous archival records that Kimberly Christen addresses or those related to dismantling binaries that Moya Bailey and Reina Gossett mention all seem to segregate the data of these communities rather than opening up an inclusive space in already established and existing spaces. Is this really the best way to breakdown the biases and foster inclusivity? Or are we actually just perpetuating divisions? And, of course, to a certain extent the whole point of having systems of categorization is to be able to break down data into groups to be able to more easily analyze and use it. So, is it really possible to create a totally inclusive and non-segregated system for working with data? These are the questions I’m left pondering as we finish our first two weeks. I don’t expect to come away with answers but perhaps just greater clarity on the problems and the solutions that have been attempted.

Claire’s Intro

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I began my graduate studies in the History of Art at Pitt in 2019 after spending seven years working in a variety environments–museum education, gallery administration, higher-ed publishing, and academic administration. Most recently, I worked for the Center for Renaissance studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago where I had the opportunity to help out with a few DH projects, including a new Italian Paleography website. This gave me a little taste of the Digital Humanities world, and I’m interested in thinking more about how I can smartly engage in this through my research, which is part of why I’m here. The other part is that I’m interested in thinking about and across disciplines as I develop a dissertation project and consider possible career paths.

My research interests have to do with the role of Early Modern metaphysical theory in shaping a connection between meaning and materiality in the creation of 16th- and 17th-century Blessed Sacrament chapels and altars, especially in Rome. I am interested in the motivations which led to the commissioning of these works and the artistic process of design, in addition to the formal qualities of the preparatory works, the final artworks, and the space they occupy. Currently, I am working to develop a dissertation project related to the interest of the Beati Moderni and other Counter-Reformation era personalities in early-Christian archeology. Out of these interests, a secondary interest is developing in book history, especially the visual and textual descriptions of art and architecture found in early Modern books and manuscripts.