ARLIS/NA 45th Annual Conference

William Blueher will discuss the development of a digital humanities tool that allows users to engage with the entire corpus of Metropolitan Museum of Art publications in a novel way. It provides users with a new and intuitive access point to this large set of data, producing a whole new way of accessing this material. Most remarkably of all, this tool was built in just over a semester by a single graduate assistant working one day a week (in consultation with two professional librarians), and this talk will focus both on how libraries can begin developing DH tools without large allocations of staff time and how the development of these tools can serve a pedagogic purpose as we help train emerging library professionals.

Sarah Seymore will discuss the impact of recently released datasets from museums like the MOMA, Tate Collection, and other cultural heritage institutions that have prompted interest in exploring what art historical data has to offer. With the results of her survey on art historical data usage (http://goo.gl/forms/Uc3bEsMitR0w81af1), she will analyze how art historians and others are using this data and what is being done with datasets related to art history. This talk will describe the results of the survey and further implications of those results, as well as examine the current state of open art historical datasets.