Wired! Lab faculty and staff presented the session, “Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D GeoSpatial Networks” at the College Art Association annual meeting in New York in February. Organized by associate research professor Victoria Szabo, who also spoke in the session, other speakers from the Wired! Lab included Hannah Jacobs, digital humanities specialist; Mark Olson, assistant professor of the practice; and Ed Triplett, instructor. Paul Jaskot, professor and director of the Wired! Lab, was a respondent.

In summer 2018 the Getty Foundation sponsored a workshop on Advanced Topics in Digital Art History on 3D and (Geo)Spatial Networks. Szabo was the grant PI, with Jaskot and Olson as co-PIs. Over the course of the workshop and follow-up activities, the group explored some of the key “hard questions” that arise for digital art history, both as a subdiscipline of art history, and as part of an emergent set of interdisciplinary digital humanities practices.

This interdisciplinary group of researchers is especially interested in critical approaches to the digital representation of material objects, systems, and phenomena, and in how engagement with those representations leads to new knowledge in the field of art history. In particular, the group hoped to leverage and expand on the natural affinities between digital art historical problems and computational methods. The focus was on art historical questions of scale and perspective, both of which are well suited to mapping and 3D modeling tools. Scalable art historical questions are those that require, or would benefit from, computational methods to address. The group is also interested in digging deeper into the theoretical and critical questions raised by introducing computational methods into humanistic research.