ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a methodological guide for digital humanities projects that measure, compare, or analyze gesture over large sets of images. It explores that the gesture——the relative positions and articulation of the human body’s limbs——is an unusually quantifiable parameter of visual studies, and therefore an extremely useful basis for Digital Art History. Gesture Studies, as it has become known, is already a strongly interdisciplinary field, containing art history, historical anthropology, psychology, semiotics and linguistics; this perhaps makes the intrusion of the computational less controversial. The most famous theory of gesture in the history of art is the “Pathosformel,” formula for the expression of pathos, described by Aby Warburg. Even correcting for the dimensions of the image, or indeed of the individual human body, two-dimensional coordinates are affected by the proportion of the limbs. Critical and historical discussions of gesture itself are rarer, and are usually consigned to historical anthropology.
