The Digital U-Turn in Art History

Abstract

Summary Over the past decade humanities researchers have increasingly come to embrace digital methods. Art historians, however, have often resisted engaging with these developments. In this article, we explore the driving factors behind art history's reticence toward the digital turn in the humanities. Reflecting on the historiographic trajectory of the emerging field of digital art history (DAH) versus art history more generally, we selected a sample of recent articles published between 2010-2019. We used a mixture of methods, both digital and non-digital, to uncover the prevalence for different art-historical theories in DAH versus mainstream art history. We began our study by performing a text mining analysis on the references and bibliography of articles published in DAH, Art Journal, and Art History. Once we had determined a list of frequently-cited authors, we dug deeper to see how they were discussed in the body of individual texts. In other words, we employed traditional humanities methods: close reading and interpretation. DAH is typically positioned as something completely new to the discipline. However, as this study shows, DAH is closely tied to particular pre-digital methods and theories of art history, namely formalist and iconographic methods prevalent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, rather than critical theory methods commonly found in more recent art-historical scholarship. Based on our analysis, we argue that DAH methods have not been embraced by art historians more generally because of fundamental differences in the theoretical underpinnings of DAH versus the broader field of art history.