ABSTRACT
The “computational turn” in the humanities has come at the time of another radical shift, the “global turn.” Global art history, like the evolution of the personal computer and hand-held devices, has been more than forty years in the making. Changes to art-historical practice have increased exponentially in the last twenty years in response to the web. The author argues that creating metadata for digital objects following the principles of Linked Open Data not only lays the groundwork for digital projects, but also constitutes a form of art-historical writing. “Metadata” is data about that data, which might appear as keywords; the titles, dates, and sizes of files; or phrases written in a programming language that a computer can read more easily. When a digital record is made for a work of art or an artifact of material culture, a new informational surrogate is created for the real-world object.
