Events
Technical Art History Colloquium: ‘Computer Science and Art History’
The newly initiated Technical Art History Colloquium is organised by prof. dr. Sven Dupré (Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam, PI ERC ARTECHNE) and dr. Arjan de Koomen (University of Amsterdam, Department of Art History, Coordinator MA Technical Art History). Monthly meetings will take place on Thursdays, alternately in Utrecht and Amsterdam.
In the second edition of the Technical Art History Colloquium, prof. dr. Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam) and prof. dr. Jeroen Stumpel (Utrecht University) will give presentations about Computer Science and Art History. The format of the colloquium is open, but there will always be substantial time for audience discussion. All those interested are welcome (admission free). For more information, please contact j.briggeman@uu.nl.
Programme
Digesting Digital Art History
Jeroen Stumpel (Professor of Iconology and Art Theory, Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University).
There is no doubt that the term ‘digital art history’ has been on the rise during the last years. One week before our meeting for instance, a two-day conference under this very title will take place in Regensburg, and about half a year ago a brand new scholarly journal was launched, named Digital Art History. This growing interest among scholars is of course part of a larger phenomenon, the momentum of digital humanities. One might wonder what to expect from ‘digital art history’ in the field of technical art history, where the material object, rather than the encoded message has a central position. In my talk, I will review the ambitions and results of digital art history as expressed by the new journal Digital Art History, and briefly compare them with trends and practices as exemplified in a slightly older journal: Art Matters; International Journal for Technical Art History.
Telling the History of Painting with Visual Methods
Marcel Worring (Professor in Data Science for Business Analytics (Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam), associate professor in the Informatics Institute (IVI, University of Amsterdam) and associate director of Amsterdam Data Science).
The access to large repositories of digitized paintings opens up a large array of possibilities to study the history of paintings in new and exciting ways. In this presentation we will introduce the VISTORY project, a new collaboration between computer scientists and art historians where we aim to bring out the best of both worlds: the computer vision, machine learning, and visualization tools capable of processing and presenting large amounts of digital paintings with the expertise of art historians for detailed analysis of small numbers of paintings. We will introduce some of the technical components on which the project will build and from there explain the innovations we aim to bring.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648718).