Digital Humanities Art Art History Cultural Heritage

AY2025/2026 Semester 1

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.