ABSTRACT
Within the field of art history, pointer-based data systems, such as ArtStor, Europeana, and The Museum System, have been prominent since the late 1960s, but research projects that focus on proxy-based data systems, such as Prown’s pioneering work, have seen a sharp rise in recent years. Producing pointers and proxies in the service of research and then thinking about the ways that such representations might help scholars learn more about the lived, human experience is not a pattern of scholarly behavior that was invented alongside digital computing. One might even stipulate that the production and contemplation of art objects serves some of these same societal functions. However, creating computer-readable pointers and proxies and using computational devices to perform operations over them is definitively a product of the twentieth century. Unlike in a pointer-based system, proxy-based “models of” need not stand in direct and concrete relation to the phenomenal world.
