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oa Source, Surrogate, Store, and Search: Significant Sites in Post-Digitized Art History

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Comparative analysis of online platforms frequently consulted by art historians allows us to identify how digitization has affected everyday practices in the discipline at multiple levels. Expanding on Johanna Drucker's (2013) distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘digitized’ art history, this chapter analyses a selection of search results from three widely-consulted online platforms that offer access to high-quality digital art reproductions. It suggests that the use of these platforms by art historians can be understood in light of the wider phenomenon of post-digitization, where by internet users behave in practice as ifeverything is already digitized, even if they know in theory that it is not. To help post-digitized art historians disentangle the results of their research from the research of their search results, the chapter argues for the development of a critical methodology, centred on the four significant sites of source, surrogate, store, and search.

Keywords: art-historical methodology ; Artstor ; digital platforms ; digitization ; JSTOR ; paradata ; photographic reproduction ; research practice ; Smarthistory ; Wikimedia Commons

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Source, Surrogate, Store, and Search: Significant Sites in Post-Digitized Art History
Intellect , 20 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781789389760_3
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  10. Drucker, J. (2013) ‘Is there a “digital” art history?’ Visual Resources, 29:1–2, Routledge, pp. 5–13.
  11. Gitelman, L. (2014), ‘Searching and thinking about searching JSTOR’, Representations, 127:1, University of California Press, pp. 73–82.
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  13. Huvila, I. (2022), ‘Improving the usefulness of research data with better paradata’, Open Information Science, 6:1, pp. 28–48.
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  14. JSTOR (2023), Home – About JSTOR, https://www.about.jstor.org/. Accessed 31 January 2023 .
  15. Kamin, D. (2017), ‘Mid-century visions, programmed affinities: The enduring challenges of image classification’, Journal of Visual Culture, 16:3, pp. 310–36.
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