ABSTRACT
Johanna Drucker has described the difficulties encountered by art history in adapting and adhering to digital techniques for the study of cultural heritage. In addition to the question of how to rethink art history in light of technologies that can help reader decipher and reconstruct artistic data on the basis of their material elements, the other issue to be addressed concerns the effective management of the digital information and communication technology resources employed in the treatment and interpretation of an artwork. In this case, the study of digital art history raises problems of a methodological nature. Drucker proposes a distinction between “digitized” and “digital” art history, where the former corresponds to “repository building” derived from the use of online resources and the latter comprises “analytic techniques enabled by computational technology.” Simultaneously enlarging and narrowing the field of vision through the use of digital technologies revealed things that had hitherto lain hidden in plain sight.
