Digital Humanities Art Art History Cultural Heritage

This course charts the historical relationship that exists between emergent technologies and the creative arts. In particular it focusses on the impact (and potential) of the `computational turn' on the work of artists, art historians, heritage practitioners, and story tellers. The Digital Humanities are offering new `ways of knowing' built upon our existing `ways of seeing', but is this a threat or an opportunity? It is, for sure, a powerful tool that may change art history and move it away from the time-honoured investigation into typologies, significant form, style, meaning, narrative, and social context. Or perhaps it is merely an extension of this methodology. At worst, it is the `subordination of human activity to metric evaluation.' Might one outcome of the development of networks of knowledge and web-based methods of dissemination be a democratization of the discipline, or is it merely ushering in a different form of colonialism? It also leads to important ethical questions such as: Can AI make art? Can the artist be replaced? What is the future of museums and galleries? Can heritage be `gamified?? Can a robot conduct a choral symphony or write poetry?

The course will conclude with a significant case study. This is a real-life, hands-on, project where critical engagement and innovative thinking on the part of the student can be applied in practice to complex research investigation. It demonstrates the collaborative, trans-disciplinary, computationally engaged nature of work happening in the humanities and invites students to participate in it.